A team of University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) researchers recently received an award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to help launch an alliance of Arkansas organizations that provide services to women who have been incarcerated.
According to research, justice-involved women commonly suffer from chronic physical and mental health conditions that are exacerbated by incarceration and often go unaddressed after they are released. Yet, there is little research on best practices to meet their needs, even though the number of incarcerated women in the United States has grown over 700 percent in the past several decades.
The two-year, $250,000 funding award through the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award program was given to Melissa Zielinski, Ph.D., director of the Psychiatric Research Institute’s Health and the Legal System (HEALS) Lab, who, along with a team that includes Katy Allison, Ph.D., of UAMS and April Bachrodt, Ph.D., of Magdalene Serenity House, will use the funds to build the Women’s Justice-Health Alliance (WJHA). Members of the WJHA will build capacity to do research on justice-involved women’s health together and will develop research priorities that will drive applications for research funding in the future. The team’s efforts will be overseen by a community advisory board of eight women who themselves have been incarcerated.
Women released from prisons and jails face many barriers when trying to access quality health care, according to Zielinski, from cost and lack of insurance and transportation to an unfamiliarity with the resources available to them. Finding services in more rural areas is also a challenge. But, Zielinski says, the question is “where to start?”
“We’re going to spend the next two years doing a lot of preparatory work to learn what the priorities of this community are and how we can come together to do research to learn how to best achieve them,” said Zielinski.
Potential partners in the alliance will include academic and professional organizations, advocacy groups, community non-profits, health-service providers, religious ministries, and state agencies. Zielinski and her team already have one partner in the alliance, Magdalene Serenity House, a residential recovery program in Fayetteville, which is co-leading the project.
Zielinski says that the team plans to focus on recruiting many more partners to the alliance by the end of July. “Then we’ll get together and talk about what we want to do,” she said.
One of the priorities of the project will be conducting interviews with the organizations and the women they serve, she added. “We’ll come up with a research agenda based on those interviews.”
PCORI is a Washington, D.C.-based independent non-profit organization authorized by Congress to fund comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) (CER) that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. The “Arkansas Building Capacity for Women’s Justice-Health PCOR/CER” award (#26289) is part of a portfolio of projects that PCORI has funded to help develop a community of patients and other stakeholders equipped to participate as partners in CER and disseminate PCORI-funded study results. Through the Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities and organizations interested in and able to participate in, share, and use patient-centered CER.