Research Analyst I

Duke University:

 

Duke University was created in 1924 through an indenture of trust by James Buchanan Duke. Today, Duke is regarded as one of America’s leading research universities. Located in Durham, North Carolina, Duke is positioned in the heart of the Research Triangle, which is ranked annually as one of the best places in the country to work and live. Duke has more than 15,000 students who study and conduct research in its 10 undergraduate, graduate and professional schools. With about 40,000 employees, Duke is the third largest private employer in North Carolina, and it now has international programs in more than 150 countries.

 

Occupational Summary

 

During some of the most critical years of child development, prenatally through age three, families spend significant time and resources navigating a fragmented system of care. Some families are able to get needed resources for their children, while others do not do so for a variety of reasons.

 

The Get Ready Guilford Initiative (GRGI) charts a new vision that will offer all families universal screening to connect them to the right resources at the right time. The goal of the initiative is for families of infants, toddlers and preschoolers to get what resources and services they need and when they need it, so every child enters school ready to succeed. GRGI is implementing prenatal and postnatal universal navigation visits with volunteering pregnant women to learn about the process, the screening tools, and integration with pregnancy care managers (OBCM). GRGI has worked with local and state partners at the Guilford County Department of Public Health (DPH), Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), Partnership for Community Care (P4CC), Care Coordinator for Children (CC4C), Guilford Family Connects, Nurse-Family Partnership, HealthySteps, and other local providers to develop a plan to pilot a universal approach to prenatal and postnatal screening.

 

In Durham, in collaboration with our colleagues in Guilford County, our team at the Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) and Duke Children’s Primary Care (DCPC) is overseeing a randomized control trial to assess the impact of prenatal and postnatal navigation. This work includes building an understanding of the existing programs and services in the prenatal and postnatal space; implementing and evaluating universal approach, screening for individual needs of families, and referral to community resources; identifying questions or challenges to implementing this process and solutions to these challenges; and developing documentation for consent, data sharing, and follow-up contacts.

 

Working with the project team at CCFP and DCPC, the Community Navigator will implement and test aspects of a universal screening approach prenatally and postnatally at 12-, 24-, and 36-months.

 

Work Performed

A detailed description of functional areas and tasks follows:

In coordination with both teams described above, the Community Navigator will:

• Coordinate and participate in a variety of duties to assist investigators in the implementation of a research study with families and children.
• Participate in scheduling navigation visits via email, phone, as well as letter and/or in-person scheduling when required.
• Organizing and conducting virtual and in-home family navigation visits, as permitted by COVID restrictions 
  • Duties will include scheduling visits, obtaining consent to participate, conducting navigation visits per manual protocol, administering standardized assessments, recording interview responses when required, and follow-up with families after they have received referrals to community agencies to ensure connection to resources and get feedback about the process.
  • Work with families in a respectful, family-centered manner, to support successful connections to community resources.

• Enter data gathered from identified screening tools in a specified database following Duke University Hospital System’s data privacy protocol ensuring that only clients who have provided informed consent are entered into the database.
• Work with the research team to develop measures related to acceptability of the process to families, providers, clinical and administrative personnel, and community programs.
• Work with the research team to assess feasibi