Recruitment and retention of Latinos in a primary care-based physical activity and diet trial: The Resources for Health study

Abstract

Mandates to include women and minority populations in research have heightened the need to identify successful recruitment strategies. This paper describes the recruitment and retention strategies used as part of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a physical activity and dietary intervention targeting low-income, predominantly Latino patients in a primary health care clinic. Data on the recruitment and retention rates and the representativeness of participants are presented. Strategies included hiring bilingual staff, translating and culturally adapting intervention materials and soliciting ongoing consultation from patients, clinicians and organizations providing services to the Latino community. The primary recruitment procedure involved letters from physicians followed by phone calls from project staff to patients identified from electronic medical records. Two hundred patients were recruited into the RCT (78% of those reached and eligible), with 69 and 81% reached for the 6-week and 6-month follow-ups, respectively. Women were more likely to both participate and remain in the trial, and there was a trend toward greater recruitment and retention of Spanish speakers. By engaging the community, clinicians and patients, this study was able to successfully recruit and retain a large proportion of this often difficult to reach Latino sub-population of patients with multiple chronic conditions.

What are successful recruitment and retention strategies for underserved populations? Examining physical activity interventions in primary care and community settings

“…Intervention characteristics-Interventions most commonly were group-based classes; also included were promotion of walking [28][29][30][31][32][33][34], individual, homebased lifestyle physical activity (physical activity type not specified) [35,36], and mixed/multiple types of activity [33,[37][38][39]. The majority of interventions were either neighborhood-or community-based (n=11) or at community/cultural or recreation centers (n=9).…”

“…The majority of interventions were either neighborhood-or community-based (n=11) or at community/cultural or recreation centers (n=9). Other intervention venues consisted of churches [33,[40][41][42][43], primary care clinics [29,38,44,45], home-based [30,36], health clubs [46][47][48], and schools [35,[49][50][51][52][53]. Persons delivering the intervention varied; the interventionists' training and background experience were inconsistently described.…”

“…Eight studies [29,38,48,[54][55][56][57][58] reported on Hispanic participants as all or part (50% or greater) of their study population of interest. Two studies purposively recruited a combination of Hispanic and African American participants [54,56].…”

“…As with recruitment, all studies had multiple retention strategies; retention strategies were usually described in much less depth, however. The studies with the highest retention rates emphasized the importance of formative research and ongoing process evaluation that they conducted to specifically maintain or enhance retention via a carefully designed, well-developed, appealing intervention [7,30,37,38,43,45,49,50,53,55,56,58,65].…”

Increasing Latino Parents’ Verbal Interactions with Their Preschool-Aged Children

“…A total of 106 parent-child dyads were randomized, 92 had exposure to the allocated interventions and completed baseline data collection, 79 were retained and provided data at the end of the intervention period, 3 months later, resulting in an 86% retention rate for those who attended the first session of the assigned interventions (refer to Figure 1). Both transportation to and from study sessions and on-site childcare services were provided free of charge to all study participants to overcome the most frequently cited barriers to study participation [20][21][22][23].…”