Building Engagement in Healthy Aging Outcomes Research with Older Women with Lived Experience of Incarceration

Community-dwelling older women (age >50) with lived experience of incarceration (LEI) are an increasing yet mostly unacknowledged group with long-term health challenges.Research addressing aging-related health in older women with LEI is rare, and almost none engages collaboratively and equitably with older women to understand their aging-related health needs, preferences, and priorities.To foster awareness and readiness for engagement in outcomes research, we co-planned, implemented, and evaluated a sequence of interlinked activities and outputs with older women, clinicians and researchers, and community advocates.The Older Women Leading Healthy Aging Research Together (OWLHART) network met monthly from November 2024-June 2025.Four to six women, two clinician-researchers, two community advocates, and a project team shared aging-related health beliefs, concerns, and outcome priorities; learned the basics of research and benefits of patient-centered outcomes research; created tools to teach about older women's health after incarceration and the role of research; and developed outreach to disseminate the work.OWLHART models an equity-focused capacity-building approach for research engagement outside the clinical setting and with a patient group that has been overlooked as patients and as research partners.