We would like to give MPH Student Ida Tovar a massive shout-out for her accomplishments in receiving a $10,000 mini-grant for her project, Elevating Health of Populations and Providers: Applying the Circle of Health tool among Utah Community Healthcare Workers of Utah in Personal and Professional Settings.
Currently, 61,010 community health workers are working across the United States, with approximately 760 workers employed within Utah. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, health professionals have been pushed to their personal and professional limits.
The Circle of Health tool was identified as a potential tool to help monitor the needs of both community health workers and the needs of the community using a holistic approach. The tool explores the seven health domains – emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual.
Keeping this in mind, the project focused on revising the Circle of Health tool and examining its efficiency within a setting of community healthcare workers in personal and professional settings. The mini-grant funds will be used to complete CoH revision, host World Café groups, data preparation/analysis, and results dissemination.
Ida says, “This project has taught me a lot about how to collaborate on a research project. Working with a research group while also collaborating with our community partners Oreta Tuploa & Utah Community Healthcare Workers (CHWs), is a special opportunity to build partnerships for our research team that can last beyond this project. These types of research studies are also a way of contributing to the awareness and credibility of CHWs as not just lay workers in our community but skilled participants and partners for community-based research.
During our World Cafés, CHWs shared their valuable depth of knowledge and expertise gained through lived experiences. This type of feedback is important because it helps researchers learn the reason(s) for the effectiveness of CHW work when serving populations, they come from.”
Others who have significantly impacted this project and the award of this grant are Dr. Lisa Gren, Dr. Caren Frost, Dr. Scott Benson, Kate O’Farrell, Jordan E. Johnson, and Oreta Tupola (Program Coordinator for UCHWA).