Research and scholarly methods: Community-engaged research

Community-engaged research (CER) is a collaborative approach used by health services researchers to integrate the voice of community stakeholders in research design to increase the relevance and impact of research in advancing health outcomes. CER is guided by principles such as leveraging strengths and resources of a community, ensuring research is mutually beneficial for all partners, facilitating co-learning among all partners, disseminating findings to all partners, and committing long term to a community. The level of community engagement can range on a continuum from outreach, consultations, and community-academic partnerships to community-based participatory research depending on the type and extent of community stakeholder involvement. Given pharmacists' accessibility to the public and role as the medication expert across the health care continuum, pharmacist researchers can use CER to authentically engage communities to better understand medication-related needs and design community-informed interventions to optimize medication outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical overview of CER for pharmacist researchers by: (1) introducing the CER continuum and describing how CER principles can be used before, during, and after a study, (2) describing practical considerations for conducting CER, and (3) discussing two examples of CER in improving medication-related outcomes in health services research.