This Center proposal builds on a foundation of strong partner relationships and brings together unique resources to address gaps in evidence-based health promotion strategies and barriers to the translation process. Proposed activities for the next five years integrate community-based research with public health training and practice in order to support and conduct more informed and responsive research and reduce the time for new findings to be put into practice. This proposal extends prior work of the Center by proposing the development of infrastructure to integrate public health practice and practice-based research. Specifically, the Center will work with partners to: a) establish the Colorado Public Health Practice-Based Research Network, b) conduct a core research project that will create new knowledge about community planning processes, best practices for youth engagement, and the influence of middle school environments and policies on the overall health of middle school students, c) build sustainable health monitoring including accessible and useable community health profiles based on primary data collection at the local level using new systems, secondary data, and comprehensive school based child health assessments, and d) conduct high quality evaluation capacity, identify opportunities for cross-site evaluations that will expand what can be learned from a single site, and identify promising community programs that warrant a more rigorous evaluation. Key partners include the Center's Community Advisory Board, community project-specific steering committees, expert external advisors, the Colorado School of Public Health and its Center for Public Health Practice, the Colorado Clinical Translational Sciences Institute, the Area Health Education Centers, the Public Health Alliance of Colorado and its local and state public health constituents, the Colorado Department of Education, the Interagency Prevention Leadership Council, the SLV prevention Coalition and its Health Trends and Data Committee, the SLV Rural Health Network and the national Prevention Research Centers Network.
The Rocky Mountain Prevention Research Center works with community partners to identify local health priorities and conduct community-based research and program evaluation. The Center's health priorities include nutrition, physical activity, mental health and related risk behaviors, chronic disease and health disparities. By working together with the public health practitioners, the Center increases knowledge about affective methods for improving the health of communities and reducing health disparities
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