Working Together to Stop TB: Building Community Partnerships to Eliminate TB in African American Communities

Background: The rates of Tuberculosis (TB) continue to decrease in the United States thanks to successful screening and targeted testing.  However, the TB rates among African Americans are more than seven times higher than that among Caucasians. This disparity has existed for decades and is especially visible in the Southeastern United States.  Despite the fact that TB disproportionately affects African American adults and children, at health care summits African American community leaders said they were not aware of this problem in their community.  This lack of awareness signifies a need for education and prevention work and the best way to achieve this goal is through the formation of community partnerships. 

Program background: The Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center (SNTC) is one of four Regional Training and Medical Consultation Centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support the education and training missions of TB programs throughout the U.S.  SNTC partnered with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to develop the Working Together to Stop TB: Building Community Partnerships to Eliminate TB in African American Communities toolkit. The toolkit includes: two user guides, a 15-minute video, a PowerPoint presentation with speaker notes and additional resources which guide the user through the process of convening a forum.  SNTC developed training materials using the health communication processes as well as received input from the African American community on all messages and images used for the program. This culminated in a 2 day training to instruct selected community members how to utilize this toolkit in order to develop community partnerships with the goal of raising awareness about TB in the African American community.  

Evaluation Methods and Results: Evaluation methods included a survey using Qualtrics, an online survey software, as well as a qualitative phone interview.  9 pilot sites were chosen to participate in this pilot program, which included attending the 2 day training as well as forming the community partnerships and hosting health events.  4 sites completed the follow up survey.  Based on their responses, 3 out of 4 sites were able to conduct WTST community forums. All 4 sites participated in health fairs. 3 out of the 4 sites were able to conduct meeting presentations and trainings at various community organizations. 3 out of the 4 sites were able to distribute educational materials. 

Conclusions: The effort undertaken to develop materials that specifically target this community was proven to be successful. The goal of this project was to prompt the pilot sites to take action in their communities and all pilot sites were able to initiate some form of action.  Keeping up communication and continuing to provide materials to these sites to support this effort will be critical for long term success.

Implications for research and/or practice: Having targeted messages that have been tested by the African American community is important when implementing any intervention.  Providing opportunities for continued learning also proved invaluable as well as staying in communication and encouraging those in the pilot sites.  Implementing continued feedback from the participants will allow programs such as these to continue to evolve and be successful.