Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Research Article

Stroke Investigative Research and Education Network: Public Outreach and Engagement

Department of Public Health, KNUST Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana

Corresponding Author:

Arti Singh
Public Health Specialist
Department of Public Health
KNUST Hospital, Kumasi, Ghana
Tel: +233-244464576
E-mail: artisingh_uk@yahoo.com

Received Date: March 04, 2017; Accepted Date: April 22, 2017; Published Date: April 24, 2017

Citation: Singh A, Jenkins C, Calys-Tagoe B, Arulogun OS, Sarfo S, et al. (2017) Stroke Investigative Research and Education Network: Public Outreach and Engagement. J Community Med Health Educ 7:518. doi:10.4172/2161-0711.1000518

Copyright: © 2017 Singh S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Stroke is becoming a leading cause of disability and death, and a major public health concern in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The Stroke Investigative Research and Education Network (SIREN) seeks to comprehensively characterize the genomic, sociocultural, economic, and behavioral risk factors for stroke and to build effective teams for research to address and decrease the burden of stroke and other non-communicable diseases in SSA. One of the first steps to address this goal was to effectively engage the communities that suffer high burdens of disease in SSA. This paper describes the process of SIREN project's community engagement activities in Ghana and Nigeria. The aims of community engagement (CE) within SIREN are to: i) elucidate information about knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and practices (KABP) about stroke and its risk factors from individuals of African ancestry in SSA; ii) educate the community about stroke and ways to decrease disabilities and deaths from stroke; and iii) recruit 3000 control research subjects to participate in a case-control stroke study. CE focused on three-pronged activities-constitution and interaction with Community Advisory Board (CABs), Focus Group Discussions (n=27) and community education and outreach programs (n=88). FGDs and outreach programs indicate that knowledge of stroke, as well as risk factors and follow-up evidence-based care is limited and often late. Almost all indicated that genetic testing could help health provider’s better treat stroke and help scientists better understand the causes of stroke. Over 7000 individuals have received education on cardiovascular risk factors and about 5,000 have been screened for cardiovascular risk factors during the outreaches. The CE core within SIREN is a first of its kind public outreach engagement initiative to evaluate and address perceptions about stroke and genomics by patients, caregivers, and local leaders in SSA and has implications as a model for assessment in other high stroke risk populations.

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