With assistance from CTSI consultants, UCSF’s Center to Address Disparities in Children’s Oral Health in the School of Dentistry, nicknamed CAN DO 2, received NIH renewal funding for 7 more years. Focused on enabling partnering with communities so that they play a vital role in improving health outcomes, CTSI’s Community Engagement Program worked with the CAN DO 2 team to identify more than twenty community partners. These committed stakeholders played a key role in helping to develop the research design for one of the RO1s, developing a community outreach plan for a second RO1, and framing and drafting proposal content dealing with a mandatory community liaison program.
The resulting research is helping to improve dental caries treatments, as well as identify and evaluate preventive strategies and the best means for making dental treatments available to those who need them the most. Jane Weintraub, Chair of the UCSF Division of Oral Epidemiology and Dental Public Health, described this collaboration between CTSI and CAN DO 2 as “instrumental in the development of this grant submission.” Additionally, she noted that “there's no question that it is a much stronger application because of the assistance we obtained.”
Beyond community engagement, CTSI Consultation Services cover topics ranging from biostatistics and data management to geographical information systems and ethics. Read the full story to learn more about results of this ongoing research and the most recent round of CAN DO studies.
