About:
NAOPO partnered with Department of Native Hawaiian Health at the University of Hawai’i and Papa Ola Lokahi to collaborate on this project.

The Peau o le Vasa: Accelerating the Currents of Health Equity for Pasifika People is a Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) project focused on leveraging the expertise of Community Health Workers (CHWs) to accelerate health equity for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities. The premise of our CBPR project is that CHWs can promote healthy lifestyle changes to address cardiometabolic medical conditions—such as obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease—by disseminating and implementing culturally responsive, evidence-based interventions while attending to social determinants of health (SDOH) needs within diverse settings. Culturally-adapted lifestyle interventions like the PLP that are enhanced to address contextually-relevant SDOH needs may improve the adoption and maintenance of healthy behavior changes and management of cardiometabolic conditions.

The purpose of this CBPR project is to test the potential efficacy of the PILI Lifestyle Program (PLP) enhanced with integrated SDOH components to be delivered by NHPI CHWs to NHPIs with cardiometabolic-related conditions in a two-arm pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) using a waitlist control. The investigators will evaluate the efficacy of the PLP+SDOH in improving the primary outcomes of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), systolic blood pressure, cholesterol, and weight in 180 adult NHPIs with pre-diabetes/type 2 diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and/or overweight/obesity over 3-months as well as evaluating the feasibility of tailoring intervention strategies to meet local community needs while still maintaining the core culturally adapted PLP lessons and content.