3006 Academic-Community Partnership and Capacity Strengthening for Deaf Community-engaged Research in the Dominican Republic

Abstract

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: Deaf communities in many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) struggle to organize, advocate, and reach social and health equity in their nations. In the Dominican Republic (DR), the health and social status of Deaf citizens is unclear, which obfuscates action and advocacy based on data. A set of successful pre-existing US-DR partnerships that function well but were not previously connected, organized around submission of a community-based NIH research grant and pilot work to support it. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Adapting the Partnership Synergy Framework for this purpose, we evaluate the partnership, its evolution, and its experience in implementing formative research. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Our experience showed the local Deaf community organization easily recruited and interfaced with the Deaf community; presence of a trusted external organization facilitated entry of the PUCMM-UR research team; and stakeholders are enthusiastic about the partnership, its outputs, and the ability to recruit Dominican Deaf citizens into research. The partnership organized around production of an R21 to the Fogarty International Center (NIH), including Human Subjects certification, budget and scope of work negotiation, and inclusion of preliminary data. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: The engagement of Deaf communities globally is virtually non-existent in clinical and translational research. This partnership in the Dominican Republic shows that partners can organize around common goals and identify logistics required to produce pilot data and an NIH grant.