Enhancing the public health academic’s role in community engagement: building trusting relationships through support service delivery

Community engagement processes, specifically when initiated or led by public health researchers/academics often take the form of “outreach,” wherein the academic contacts a community experiencing a public health problem to perform a research study about the problem, or “consultation,” where the academic content expert is called on by a community to share what is known about a particular public health problem. Both of these forms of community engagement and those involving the public health academic/researcher have the potential to provide elements of community health improvement to the citizens in the community. Consider public health academic approaches to community engagement grounded in research models such as Community-Based Participatory Research, Implementation Research, and Team Science. Each of these models and strategies through which public health academics engage with communities have been widely used with many documented successful conclusions. However, based on work by the authors in communities across Kentucky over the past 10 + years, the possibility exists that specifically in rural communities with multiple public health issues and the frequent existence of a fract