PATIENTS Program: Building Community Research Partnerships
Rodney Elliott discusses the PATIENTS Program, a community-research partnership for health equity. The podcast explores authenticity, engagement, & growth. About the Show Welcome to Health Hats, learning on the journey toward best health. I am Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged, old, cisgender, white man with privilege, living in a food oasis, who can afford many hats and knows a little about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. Most people wear hats one at a time, but I wear them all at once. I’m the Rosetta Stone of Healthcare. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life’s realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let’s make some sense of all this. We respect Listeners, Watchers, and Readers . Show Notes at the end. Watch on YouTube Read Newsletter The same content as the podcast but not a verbatim transcript. Could be a book chapter with images. download the printable transcript here Contents Episode Proem I specialize in patient/ caregiver/ clinician/ community partnerships and the intersection between research, technology, and the health journey. This sentence describes the nut of what Health Hats offers. The key word is partnerships . My antennae quiver when I sense a mature, evolving community-research partnership. So, I readily agreed when my friends and colleagues, Janice Tufte and Sneha Dave, invited me to attend the SHining the SpOtlight Wide (SHOW) Conference . The PATIENTS Program sponsored the SHOW Conference. The PATIENTS Program envisions a world in which patients and stakeholders are heard, inspired, and empowered to co-develop patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR). The PATIENTS Program is an interdisciplinary research team of community partners and researchers housed at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy that works to change the way we think about research by creating a path for health equity in West Baltimore. Our guest, Rodney Elliott, and his production partner, Eric Kettering, reached out to me after the virtual conference. They host a podcast, The Bridge: Your Health Your Voice , at the PATIENTS Program. We decided to interview each other for our respective podcasts. Here’s the link to Rodney and Eric’s version. Stay tuned for mine. Same raw footage, very different output. Podcast intro Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I’m Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life’s realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let’s make some sense of all of this. Health is fragile: sports injury. Health Hats: When did you first realize health was fragile? Rodney Elliott: I realized health was fragile at two distinct times. Back to that part when I said I was playing basketball overseas in Europe, I had a significant injury for one year in Italy. I was playing, and it was the start of the game. It was a jump ball. I jumped the ball to start the game. A referee didn’t move out of the way like they usually do. And I came down on his foot and fractured my ankle. I was out for the rest of the season. It was playoff time, just horrible. I rehabbed all summer, started that next year, and still had issues, so much so that I had surgery the following year. Up until that point, a sprained finger, or a bruise here and there. Nothing major that took me out. It was challenging for me mentally and financially because I couldn’t report to the next team. Luckily, I was able to have surgery. I came back, wasn’t a hundred percent, but I was good enough, and I could get back in many things. Health is fragile: caregiver And the second time was similar to one of the roles you played as a caregiver. In 2012, my mom passed away from lung cancer, but before that, I was one of her primary caregivers, myself and my dad. That was a year, a moment I’ll never forget when I was her number one caregiver when her care went from curat