Dialogue4Health. You’ll find web forums about public health and community approaches. There’s also a resource library, where you can find books, articles, presentations, among other public health resources.
- Community research, community health workers and community engagement
- Data entry, data analysis and online calculators
- Evidence-based online resources
- Health Disparities Study: Data Bases
- Online Courses and books
- Online Resources Clinical Research Methodologies
- Useful information for grant writing
Research Toolkit. Whether you are just getting started, or have been active in research for a while, they have tools and guidance for all aspects of a research project, so that you don’t have to start from scratch. This web site is organized by the research’s phases, and all of their resources have been vetted and curated by their team.
March of Dimes-Making a Community Partnership Work: A toolkit (pdf document). This toolkit is written for newcomers and seasoned organizers, community-based groups, public and private foundations, as well as local, state and federal government agencies. Although it is written for those interested in public health and human services, this toolkit can still be useful to individuals and groups addressing other community issues.
Michigan Public Health Training Center-Community-Based Participatory Research: A Partnership Approach for Public Health (Free Course). This downloadable file is intended as an introduction to Community Based Participatory Research for people who are in the early stages of using or considering using it. It is designed for academic researchers from multiple fields, including but not limited to: public health, education, nursing, medicine, and members of community-based organizations.
National Institute of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Research. Community Based Participatory Research(CBPR) Funding Opportunities and Training Initiatives. Here you can find more information about CBPR, recent funding opportunities for studies using CBPR, recent training initiatives, and other useful information.
URL: https://www.nimhd.nih.gov/programs/extramural/community-based-participatory.html
Developing and sustaining Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) partnerships: a skill building curriculum. This evidence-based curriculum is intended as a tool for community-institutional partnerships that are using or planning to use a CBPR approach to improving health. It can be used by partnerships that are just forming as well as mature partnerships.
Community toolbox (University of Kansas). Tools to help make a quick start on key activities in community work. You can learn community-building skills step-by-step; use a simple model for general guidance on assessing, planning, taking action, evaluating, and sustaining your work; access stories from people doing studies in different communities; and different services.
Principles of Community Engagement 2nd edition (online book).
URL: https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/communityengagement/pdf/PCE_Report_508_FINAL.pdf
Community-engage Research: a quick start guide for researchers (online guide).
URL: https://accelerate.ucsf.edu/files/CE/guide_for_researchers.pdf
Community Health Workers
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – Division of Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention. Webinar: Promoting Policy and Systems Change to Expand Employment of Community Health Workers (CHWs). This course is designed to provide state programs and other stakeholders with basic knowledge about CHWs, such as official definitions of CHWs, workforce development, and other topic areas. In addition, the course covers how states can become engaged in policy and systems change efforts to establish sustainability for the work of CHWs, including examples of states that have proven success in this arena.
CDC-The Community Health Worker’s Sourcebook: a Training Manual for Preventing Heart Disease and Stroke. As the title says, this is a sourcebook for the training of Community Health Workers in the prevention of heart disease and stroke
URL: https://www.cdc.gov/dhdsp/programs/spha/chw_training/index.htm
National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI)-Your Heart, Your Life: A lay health educator’s manual. This manual is part of the Salud para su Corazón initiative sponsored by the NHLBI. Salud para su Corazón develops the tools and strategies to promote heart health among Latino individuals, families, and communities.
URL: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/files/docs/resources/heart/lat_mnl_en.pdf
CDC-Road to Health Toolkit: Type 2 Diabetes guide for Community Health Workers. This guide was designed for community health workers, health educators, nurses, and others in minority communities to help promote lifestyle choices to prevent type 2 diabetes
.
URL: https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/ndep/pdfs/4-road-to-health-toolkit-users-guide.pdf
Faith Leaders Toolkit – Diabetes Management and Type 2 Diabetes Prevention. This toolkit was designed for faith leaders to help work in their communities to prevent type 2 diabetes by raising awareness and provide resources to those at risk of developing the disease.
URL: https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/professional-info/toolkits/faith-leaders.html
Stanford University, Patient Education Research Center-Spanish Chronic Disease Self-Management Program (Tomando Control de su Salud). In this site you can find information about the Chronic Disease self-management program. But if you’re interested in taking the course to be a certified trainer, Puerto Rico’s Department of Health has the license to certified interested persons as trainers. You don’t have to be a health professional to be certified.
URL: https://www.selfmanagementresource.com/programs/small-group-spanish/tomando-control-de-su-salud
Stanford University, Patient Education Research Center-Spanish Diabetes Self-Management Program (Programa de Manejo Personal de la Diabetes). In this site you can find information about the Diabetes self-management program. But if you’re interested in taking the course to be a certified trainer, Puerto Rico’s Department of Health has the license to certified interested persons as trainers. You don’t have to be a health professional to be certified.
CDC-Addressing chronic disease through Community Health Workers: A policy and system-level approach. This document provides guidance and resources for implementing recommendations to integrate community health workers (CHWs) into community-based efforts to prevent chronic disease.
In the following links you’ll be able to find easy to use programs and calculators. Some can be used for data entry and data analysis, others to make more simple calculations.
WINPEPI & PEPI. Simple programs and easy to use calculators. The goal of the program is to complement other statistical program packages.
URL: http://www.brixtonhealth.com/pepi4windows.html
EpiData Entry and EpiData Analysis. The first one is for simple data entry and for data documentation. Have document optimization characteristics and error detection. EpiData Analysis is for basic statistical analysis, graphs and complete data management
Epi Info. Public domain program design for public health practitioners and researchers. It can make easy the construction of forms and databases, data entry, and data analysis, using epidemiological statistics, maps and graphs.
SISA. This program allows making statistical analysis directly on the internet. Some of the Statistical Analysis that can be done in the web page are: One-way Anova, t-Test, Fisher exact, correlations. You can also calculate sample size or power calculation among other things.
Graphpad quickcalcs. Online calculator for scientists analyzing categorical data, continuous data, and statistical distributions. It also generates random numbers and interprets p values.
OpenEpi. Statistics for counting and person-time rates in descriptive and analytical studies, statistical analyzes, stratified exact confidence limits analysis, peer analysis, sample size and power calculations, random numbers, chi square test for trend dose -response, sensitivity, specificity and other evaluation statistics, tables RxC and links to other useful sites.
PS: Power and Sample size calculation. Interactive program for power and sample size calculation and can be downloaded free of charge. It can be used for studies with dichotomous, continuous, or survival response measures. The program can determine the sample size needed to detect a specified alternative hypothesis with the required power, the power with which a specific alternative hypothesis can be detected with a given power and/or sample size. This program can also produce graphs to explore the relationships between power, sample size and detectable alternative hypotheses. The program can generate graphs of sample size versus power for a specific alternative hypothesis, sample size versus detectable alternative hypotheses for a specified power, or power versus detectable alternative hypotheses for a specified sample size.
VassarStat. Online tools for statistical calculations
Birthda. This is a Vitalnet software for birth data analysis. It calculates birth rates, cesarean rates, teenage birth rates, fertility rates, prenatal care measures, low birth weights, birth outcomes, and other birth statistics.
CDC Wonder. Online databases that use a rich ad-hoc query system for the analysis of public health data. Reports and other query systems are also available
Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM). In the link below you will find a list of PowerPoint presentations used in workshops at the CEBM. They are free of charge, and you are free to use and modify these presentations, but if you do, it is important to acknowledge the original author in them.
Understanding Evidence-based Healthcare: A Foundation for Action online course. This web course has been created by the United States Cochrane Center as part of a project undertaken by Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE), and is designed to help consumer advocates understand the fundamentals of evidence-based healthcare concepts and skills. Registration is open and free of charge.
URL: https://courseplus.jhu.edu/core/index.cfm/go/course.home/cid/1739/
Below you will find different databases. Note that these aren’t databases from the Endowed Health Services Research Center, these are from different Centers and Organizations from Puerto Rico and the United States.
Puerto Rico Community Survey. Provides data every year, and it gives communities the current information they need to manage change. It is part of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, customized for Puerto Rico. Survey results are used to help make sure that the community gets a fair share of federal funds.
URL: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/about/puerto-rico-community-survey.html
Mental Illness and Anti-Addiction Services Administration (ASSMCA, Spanish acronym). Here you can find studies and investigations made by ASSMCA. The aim of these research studies is to change Mental Health Services in Puerto Rico for the better.
URL: https://www.assmca.pr.gov/estadistica/Pages/default.aspx
The Puerto Rican Elderly: Health Conditions (PREHCO) project. PREHCO is a project that gives quality data for researchers and public policymakers about things that affect the elderly population in Puerto Rico. Some of the data you’ll find is: health status, living arrangements, functional status, work status, health plan, among other data.
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) is an ongoing telephone epidemiological surveillance system that’s made in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This system uses a standardized questionnaire to determine the distribution of risk behaviors and health practices among adults, 18 years of age or older, in the United States and its territories.
Sexually Transmitted Disease Morbidity (1996 – 2011). This database contains Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) morbidity case statement reported to the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention (NCHHSTP), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The number of cases and disease incidence rates are reported by year, patient’s gender, age group, race/ethnicity, type of STD, and area of report.
URL: https://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/help/std-std-race-age.html
Statistics Institute of Puerto Rico – Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. In this site you can find micro databases about Puerto Rico that are available for public use. If you need the complete database, or need more information than the one available online you can contact the institute, or the person who prepare the database directly.
The Puerto Rico Renal Council. They contribute to renal disease reduction under a research perspective, surveillance and integration created to obtain information in order to strengthen their services, and at the same time identify those necessities in the renal community that are in need of new proposals. If you need data of the renal patient population in Puerto Rico, you can fill the online form in the link below.
American Community Survey. Here you can find broad social, economic, housing, and demographic profiles, not only of Puerto Rico, but of the entire American community.
Supercourse. Repository of lectures on global health and prevention, designed to improve prevention teaching. It has been produced at the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Center in the University of Pittsburgh, with core developers Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D., Faina Linkov, Ph.D. and Eugene Shubnikov M.D.
Concepts and applications of inferential statistics. This is a free book about inferential statistics. It’s completely available and it’s occasionally interactive.
Mixed methods evaluation. In this web site you can find a user-friendly handbook about mixed methods evaluation.
NYU School of Medicine Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Introduction to Clinical Research: A Web-based Self-study Program. They provide an introduction to the design and performance of clinical research projects. With the use of text, video and animation alternated with multiple choice and free text questions, they provide you with an easy-to-follow, on-your-own time way to understand the basic principles of clinical research. To access this course you’ll need to create an account.
University of Iowa Institute for Clinical and Translational Science. This is an online repository of courses used to train Clinical and Translational Science Award (CDTSA) students and mentors, as well as members of the greater world-wide research community. You’ll need to create an account to access the courses
Center for Clinical and Translational Science Training (CCTST). CTSpedia is knowledge base for clinical and translational research statistical tools and graphics biostatistical assistance. It was created as a national effort to collect wisdom, tools, educational materials and other useful items for clinical and translational researchers; and to provide timely and useful advice to clinical and translational researchers with specific problems.
Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) HIV Surveillance training manual. By design, this manual presents the basics of HIV surveillance activities. In addition, it is designed to provide a broad overview of HIV surveillance activities and practices. Because local surveillance programs might have developed policies and procedures specific to their own programs, some of the material in this manual might not apply to individual HIV surveillance systems.
URL: http://www.cste2.org/webpdfs/hivsurveillancetrainingmanual.pdf
National Institute of Health: Grants process overview. This web page provides an overview of the steps required for an application, starting with the application planning and submission until the award and close out. Look to the related resources on each page for special guidance from NIH experts that can help maximize your understanding of the grants’ processes and help you submit a successful grant application.
National Science Foundation: a guide for proposal writing
Foundation Center: a proposal writing short course
URL: https://learning.candid.org/training/introduction-to-proposal-writing/
Foundation Center: Proposal budget basics. This online course is designed to help with the basics of developing a project budget, and it is geared for those who have general knowledge of proposal development.
URL: https://learning.candid.org/training/courses/introduction-to-project-budgets/
Proposal Development. The University of Minnesota presents some tips and advice to help in the writing of different types of proposals. You will also find some external resources and NIH-specific resources.
URL: https://research.umn.edu/units/spa/proposals/proposal-development
Note: These links are being provided as a convenience and for informational purposes only; they do not constitute an endorsement or an approval by the Endowed Health Services Research Center of any of the products, services or opinions of the corporation, organization or individual. The Endowed Health Services Research Center bears no responsibility for the accuracy, legality or content of the external site, or for that of subsequent links. Contact the external site for answers to questions regarding its content.