Adults with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities (IDD) often experience health disparities. To address disparities, Healthy People 2020 includes specific disability and health goals focused on improving health care access. The study’s purpose was to review the literature exploring health care access for adults with IDD to identify opportunities for occupational therapy research and practice. A scoping review was completed of articles discussing health care access among adults with IDD in the United States. Thirty-seven articles met the inclusion criteria. Results are framed using the ecology of human performance theory identifying person and environmental issues affecting health care access of adults with IDD. Opportunities exist for occupational therapy to improve participation and health of adults with IDD through engaging in research and practice efforts addressing health care access. Occupational therapy could develop interventions to establish skills and abilities and recommend changes to the health care environment.

Marginalized communities have a documented distrust of research grounded in negative portrayals in the academic literature. Yet, trusted partnerships, the foundation for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), require time to build the capacity for joint decision-making, equitable involvement of academically trained and community investigators, and co-learning. Trust can be difficult to develop within the short time between a funding opportunity announcement and application submission. Resources to support community- and academic-based investigators’ time to discuss contexts, concerns, integration of expertise and locally acceptable research designs and data collection are limited. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded Center for American Indian Resilience and the Southwest Health Equity Research Collaborative have implemented an internal funding mechanism to support community and academic-based investigators’ travel cost and time to discuss complementary areas of interest and skills and to decide if moving forward with a partnership and a collaborative grant proposal would be beneficial to the community. The rationale and administration of this Community-Campus Partnership Support (CCPS) Program are described and four examples of supported efforts are provided. Centers and training programs frequently fund pilot grants to support junior investigators and/or exploratory research. This CCPS mechanism should be considered as precursor to pilot work, to stimulate partnership building without the pressure of an approaching grant application deadline.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been documented as an effective approach to research with underserved communities, particularly with racial and ethnic minority groups. However, much of the literature promoting the use of CBPR with underserved communities is written from the perspective of the researchers and not from the perspective of the community partner. The purpose of this article is to capture lessons learned from the community partners’ insight gained through their experiences with CBPR. A multi-investigator consensus method was used to qualitatively code the transcripts of a CBPR story-telling video series. Seven major themes were identified: (1) expectations for engaging in research, (2) cultural humility, (3) respecting the partnership, (4) open communication, (5) genuine commitment, (6) valuing strengths and recognizing capacities, and (7) collaborating to yield meaningful results. The themes drawn from the community partner’s voice align with the tenets of CBPR advanced in the academic literature. More opportunities to include the community voice when promoting CBPR should be undertaken to help introduce the concepts to potential community partners who may be research cautious.