Search

Introduction: The Institute of Translational Health Sciences (Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program hub) developed a program coined Community Voices to invite communities to submit project ideas and be matched with academic researchers. We describe formative research to understand community and academic researcher perspectives on how the program could facilitate collaborations addressing community priorities., Methods: We conducted four focus groups with 31 community-based organization (CBO) representatives and 11 semi-structured interviews with academic researchers in the Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho regions. Questions included the appeal of Community Voices to engage community and academic partners, potential program usefulness, and Community Voices' potential role in building community-academic partnerships. We used an inductive, constant comparison approach to code transcripts and thematic analysis to generate themes., Results: Most CBO representatives were female (87.1%) and Hispanic/Latino (61.3%). Most academic researchers had a PhD (63.6%) and worked at a university (81.8%). The themes were: (1) community-academic partnerships built on trust will offer mutual benefit, (2) community-initiated project ideas should prioritize community needs, (3) matchmaking will accelerate connections but should not replace time to foster partnership, (4) Community Voices should go beyond matchmaking and provide ongoing support/training, and (5) fostering effective communication is key to partnership success., Conclusions: Community Voices is a novel, bidirectional community engagement program model that advances current practices of prioritizing researchers' project ideas. This community-driven program may shift the future direction of community engagement practices where prioritizing community's ideas becomes the norm of community-academic partnerships in clinical and translational science., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare., (© The Author(s) 2023.)

Context: With concerns about opioid prescribing practices prominent in the professional and lay literature, there is less focus on patients' self-management of opioids for cancer pain and potential safety risks., Objectives: To investigate reports of opioid self-management practices and concerns among patients undergoing active cancer treatments-a group excluded from the scope of most policy initiatives on prescription opioids., Methods: This sequential multimethod study used freelisting (n = 65) and open-ended semistructured interviews with a racially diverse subgroup (n = 32). Adult ambulatory patients with solid malignancies or multiple myeloma and pain (≥4 on a scale of 0-10) were recruited from an urban National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center in Philadelphia. Freelists were analyzed using consensus analysis and semistructured interview data were analyzed using thematic analysis., Results: In freelisting, "pain relief" emerged as the primary term in relation to taking pain medications preceding "addiction" concerns. In interviews, patients described several heuristics and some potentially unsafe practices to minimize opioid use to a self-defined "normal." These included reducing opioid dose by cutting pills; self-tapering off opioids; using extended-release/long-acting opioids on an as-needed basis; mixing over-the-counter, nonopioid analgesics; and using illicit drugs to avoid "harder medicines" (opioids). Many patients preferred nonopioid treatments for pain but invariably faced access barriers. Some described assuming stewardship of their prescribed opioids and felt that oncology clinicians are quick to prescribe opioids without providing workable alternatives., Conclusions: Risks related to self-management of opioids among cancer outpatients, including potential overdose risks, need urgent attention. Interventions are needed for improving clinician-patient communication, patient education, safety, and access to effective nonopioid alternatives., (Copyright © 2019 American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)