PRIMED project participants (left to right): Paul Flaspohler, Ann Elizabeth Armstrong, Jennifer Bailer, Cameron Hay-Rollins, Toni King

GHRIC founding members, Cameron Hay-Rollins and Paul Flaspohler, together with Ann Elizabeth Armstrong in Theater, Jennifer Bailer who is the Director of Nursing at the Butler County Health Department and a Miami alumnus, and Toni King an RN and soon-to-be-certified Midwife who is also a Miami alumnus, are all engaged in a interdisciplinary pilot project using innovative and artistic methods to gain insight into the lifeworlds of people most at risk for infant mortality.

Ohio has the worst black, non-Hispanic infant mortality rate in the nation, and Butler County is one of the worst urban areas in the state, particularly for African American babies. Our pilot project, PRIMED for Action, has received funding from the Office for the Advancement of Research and Scholarship at Miami University to conduct interviews and small community focus groups to better understand the contexts that put infants at risk in our county. We submitted an NIH grant application in November 2015 to build a strong Community Based Participatory Research partnership between academic, health agency, and community members to further strive to ameliorate the problem of African American infant mortality.