Community Partners in Care (CPIC) is a collaborative research project of community and academic partners working together to learn the best way to reduce the burden that depression places on our communities and other vulnerable populations. We work in the communities of South Los Angeles (SPA 6) and Hollywood-Metro LA (SPA 4).

CPIC was developed out of five years of collaborative work on how to address depression in our communities, on many years of prior research on how to improve depression care in primary care settings, and on extensive efforts to address health disparities through community-partnered initiatives.

CPIC asks the question of whether agencies and communities working together through a community engagement process is a better way of improving depression services and client outcomes than agencies working alone. Community Engagement is our model of developing programs and conducting research through equitable partnerships.  We call this Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR). CPPR applies the Community Engagement Model to solve research questions.

CPPR projects are designed by community and academic partners for community benefit and also to document the lessons learned together for community and science stakeholders. CPPR builds community capacity for participating in and using products of research, while at the same time building academic capacity to partner effectively and integrate community perspectives into high-quality planning and research. The CPIC project is an example of a CPPR project. Community Partners In Care was designed and is being implemented in the CPPR model by a community-academic Council from Los Angeles.

We believe that working in the CPPR model will enable our initiative to decrease disparities in depression care in our communities. We are engaging community-based organizations to develop a sustainable model to support depression care in social safety-net agencies in South Los Angeles and Hollywood/ Metro L A.

Specifically, CPIC compares two approaches to support services agencies in our communities—Community Engagement and Planning (CEP) and Resources for Services (RS). First we will compare these two approaches in a research phase using a randomized design. This means that some agencies will participate in a Community Engagement and Planning process while other agencies will receive resources to provide depression-related services such as outreach, case management, and treatment. In this phase we will learn what strategies work best to deliver depression services and improve outcomes for clients.

The research phase will be followed by a dissemination phase where we will share the results with the community and we will apply the lessons learned from the research phase by jointly offering workshops and sharing the most effective strategies with the community at large.