Community–academic partnerships addressing local health inequalities during COVID-19: a qualitative evaluation

BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, inequalities among communities were amplified and local organisations had reductions in resources. In response, seven community organisations, an academic primary care and public health department, and 25 medical students partnered to co-create tailored projects to address community-defined goals. We aimed to explore community perspectives from such a partnership approach. METHODS: We did a qualitative realist evaluation to explore what works, why, and for whom regarding the community–academic partnerships. Data were gathered through ten semistructured interviews and one focus group. Themes were constructed from iterative deductive and inductive coding conducted in NVivo 10. These themes were used to continually test and refine propositions co-created with the community partners that hypothesised key components of successful partnerships that could provide a useful response during a pandemic. FINDINGS: Between June 9 and Aug 20, 2020, we gathered data from 12 community partners (nine women and three men). The community–academic partnerships led to co-creation of tangible outputs that responded to challenges facing communities experiencing poor health outcomes pre-pandemic. Enablers of effective partnerships included developing faculty–community relationships, articulating common goals tailored around local priorities, recognition of community value, and adopting a flexible, collaborative process throughout. Short timelines and long quality assurance processes were perceived as barriers. Longstanding inequalities impeded the ability of outputs to address needs for certain communities. For example, a video about COVID-19 was produced in multiple languages but not translated into Somali quickly enough, despite the absence of appropriate communications for this community. The medical students were perceived by community partners to add capacity and technical expertise. An example output was a co-produced resource pack for low-income, single parent families, accompanied by a public health campaign encouraging participation in healthy, creative activities. INTERPRETATION: The findings highlighted the enablers and barriers to successful community–academic partnerships that achieved their goals, as defined by the community. Community-academic partnerships have the potential to offer increased capacity for community interventions as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic through student involvement. FUNDING: West London Health Partnership funded two of the projects mentioned in the Abstract. This abstract presents independent work commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) under the Applied Health Research programme for North West London. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health.