Grants and Funded Projects

Building Sudanese Community Capacity for Diabetes Identification, Prevention and Care
(The Wellmark Foundation)
Principal Investigator: Lisa Skemp, PhD, RN

The purpose of this project is to collect comprehensive data on the prevalence of diabetes, prevalence of traditional health risks for diabetes and health beliefs/practices regarding diabetes prevention and care in this growing community. This data will be used to develop a community capacity building diabetes protocol (to include a community based diabetes education program) for future testing in other Iowa Sudanese communities.

The key components of the project are to conduct an ethnographic community-based health assessment to include health interviews for appraisal of the health beliefs, attitudes, knowledge and treatment of diabetes and health screenings to determine the prevalence of traditional risks for diabetes. Traditional risk factors include inactivity, diet, overall obesity, truncal obesity (distribution of fat) and elevated glucose levels. Based on the assessment, the research team and CAB will then develop, implement and evaluate an evidenced-based diabetes health protocol in this community. In partnership with Iowa ProjectEXPORT Center on Reducing Health Disparities, future funding will be sought to implement and evaluate the diabetes health protocol in other Iowa Sudanese communities. Dr. Kelley, the person responsible for this project, has research expertise in culturally based community assessment. Dr. Kathleen Clark, a nurse epidemiologist, will provide expertise in epidemiology and measurement of diabetes biological risk indicators. Dr. Mohamed Nasr and Nurse Zaki have and will continue to assist in all phases of this work (e.g. data collection, analysis, development of the diabetes health intervention protocol and dissemination). Dr. Yehieli and Iowa ProjectEXPORT will participate on the CAB and provide access to state-wide issues and resources.