Community
Community engagement is a hallmark of the BU CTSI. Its community engagement function has benefited from many long-standing relationships with our communities and our experience in community-based participatory research. Its aims are to: enhance public trust in clinical and translational research; engage the community in setting research priorities; engage community members in partnerships and collaborations; build community-based capacity for conducting clinical and translational research; educate researchers and trainees about community outreach and engage community members in training activities.
Boston Medical Center’s primary service area consists of the neighborhoods from which a significant portion of our patient population comes. These are:
- East Boston
- North Dorchester
- South Dorchester
- Mattapan
- Roxbury
- South Boston
- South End (to a lesser extent)
- Roslindale (to a lesser extent).
Some interesting statistics on Boston Medical Center patients:
- More than half of our patients have an annual income below $20,420.
- Approximately 200,000 of our patients have MassHealth, Commonwealth Care or no insurance at all.
- Illustrating diversity, there were 178,094 interpreter interactions with patients and visitors in over twenty languages. Seventy percent of all patients are from racial and ethnic minority populations, and 30 percent do not speak English as a primary language.
- The Preventive Food Pantry and Demonstration Kitchen (the only hospital-based facility of its kind in the nation) provides groceries to nearly 5,000 low-income patients and their family members each month.
- A first-of-its-kind program nationwide, the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at BMC treats over 400 patients from more than 70 countries each year…providing comprehensive health, social and legal services to refugees, asylum seekers and survivors of torture.
- As well as being the largest safety net hospital in New England, BMC is the largest and busiest provider of trauma and emergency services in New England. The Emergency Department had 128,231 visits last year.
For more information, contact ctsi@bu.edu.
