March 2020 - August 2024
Health self-management is the capacity, support, and resources to actively manage illness, make informed decisions, and engage in healthy behaviors. African Americans, specifically those with fewer socioeconomic resources, face significant barriers to self-managing a high burden of chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, and coronary heart disease. Inadequate self-management of these chronic diseases is a key barrier to achieving health equity for African American adults. The African American Chronic Care Equity
through Self-management (ACES) program is designed to support the development, implementation, and translation of culturally informed and evidence-based behavioral and health services interventions that target improvements in the self-management of chronic diseases among African American adults. The ACES program will accomplish this goal by focusing on two specific efforts: 1) exploring the role of health information and health communication behaviors in the self-management of chronic diseases among African American
adults, and 2) engaging in ongoing partnership-building efforts among interdisciplinary investigators and community stakeholders to support chronic disease self-management research. These efforts will be achieved through strategic activities including ongoing team meetings, a field scan of new and existing campus and community partnerships, the ongoing development of manuscripts, conference abstracts, and external grant applications, the provision of pilot funds to support ongoing research, supporting at least 1 MSW research
assistant, and hosting an interdisciplinary academic and community-involved half-day research symposium on chronic disease self-management research with African Americans. The ACES co-leads and collaborators are well well-positioned to facilitate synergistic health equity research with diverse campus and community partners.
