Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Background and objectives: Community-academic partnerships (CAPs) are a well-established model in health and health services research. We began a CAP, but also included a correctional partner. Applying what we already know about CAPs could help us in our partnership and in supporting the health of people who experience incarceration. Our research objective was to identify best practices of CAPs and consider how to apply them in a community-academic-corrections partnership. Approach: We searched the academic literature for best practices for CAPs. Two authors pulled out items from relevant articles, then we categorized them into domains. As we developed our community-academic-corrections partnership, we considered which best practices would apply when a correctional authority was added as a partner. Results: We developed 7 key domains. These domains were: bringing the community into the project; building new relationships while addressing the past; establishing mutually beneficial vision, goals, and purpose; roles and expectations of partners; communication; administration; and leadership. We added 2 more domains based on identified evidence: project implementation and evaluation, and building community capacity and awareness. Overall we found 32 best practice items across the 9 domains. For each item, we assessed what would work and how in our community-academic-corrections partnership, including the specific considerations needed when correctional authorities are partners. Conclusions: The CAP model has relevance for community-academic-corrections partnerships. Describing strategies to support successful partnerships and lessons learned could help advance future partnerships. Informed by best practices, careful planning for community-academic-corrections partnerships can help cut down on challenges, strengthen relationships, and support effectiveness in health services and policy research.