Equity-Mobilizing Partnerships in Community (EMPaCT): Co-Designing Patient Engagement to Promote Health Equity

Ambreen Sayani; Alies Maybee; Jackie Manthorne; Erika Nicholson; Gary Bloch; Janet A Parsons; Stephen W Hwang; James A Shaw; Aisha Lofters; Members of EMPaCT

doi:10.12927/hcq.2022.26768

Equity-Mobilizing Partnerships in Community (EMPaCT): Co-Designing Patient Engagement to Promote Health Equity

Healthc Q. 2022 Apr;24(SP):86-92. doi: 10.12927/hcq.2022.26768.

Authors

Ambreen Sayani¹, Alies Maybee², Jackie Manthorne³, Erika Nicholson⁴, Gary Bloch⁵, Janet A Parsons⁶, Stephen W Hwang⁷, James A Shaw⁸, Aisha Lofters⁹; Members of EMPaCT

Affiliations

¹ A Transition to Leadership Stream postdoctoral fellow in Patient-Oriented Research at the Women's College Research Institute at WCH in Toronto, ON, and co-initiator of EMPaCT. Ambreen can be contacted by e-mail at ambreen.sayani@wchospital.ca.
² An independent patient partner, co-initiator of EMPaCT and co-founder of the Patient Advisors Network (PAN) in Toronto, ON.
³ The president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Cancer Survivor Network in Toronto, ON.
⁴ Vice president, Cancer Control at the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer in Toronto, ON. She works with pan-Canadian partners to drive progress toward the goals of the Canadian Strategy for Cancer Control.
⁵ A family physician with St. Michael's Hospital and Inner City Health Associates and an associate professor at the University of Toronto in Toronto, ON. His clinical, educational, program development, research and advocacy interests focus on the intersection among primary care, health inequities and the social determinants of health.
⁶ A research scientist at the Applied Health Research Centre, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael's Hospital and an associate professor with the Department of Physical Therapy and the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, University of Toronto in Toronto, ON. She is a qualitative methodologist who conducts health services and policy research, with expertise in health and social equity, patient and community engagement and participatory approaches to research and knowledge translation.
⁷ The chair of Homelessness, Housing, and Health; director of the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael's Hospital; and a professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto in Toronto, ON.
⁸ An assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Toronto with cross-appointment to the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto in Toronto, ON. He serves as a research director of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ethics & Health at the University of Toronto's Joint Centre for Bioethics and is an adjunct scientist at the WCH Institute for Health System Solutions and Virtual Care.
⁹ A clinician scientist with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto and chair in Implementation Science at the Peter Gilgan Centre for Women's Cancers at WCH in Toronto, ON. Her research focuses on cancer screening and prevention with a health equity lens.

PMID: 35467517
DOI: 10.12927/hcq.2022.26768

Abstract

Equity-Mobilizing Partnerships in Community (EMPaCT) is a novel approach to patient engagement that centres diverse lived experiences and promotes equity-oriented and inclusive partnerships. As an independent community table, EMPaCT is made up primarily of patients/diverse members of community. Researchers and other decision makers come to this table with their projects to learn how to make their project more inclusive and equitable. In this paper, we detail how we used participatory co-design to define, build and grow EMPaCT as an innovative and scalable patient partnership model that promotes bottom-up action for health equity.

MeSH terms

Community-Based Participatory Research
Health Equity*
Health Promotion
Humans
Patient Participation
Research Personnel