Abstract IA06: Leveraging the NIH CHE P30 supplement as a platform to stimulate a cancer center strategic plan for addressing community cancer needs and enhancing health equity
Authors: Ashing Kimlin T. 
Published: May 2016

Federally supported health institutions, and in particular NCI designated Comprehensive Cancer Centers, are accountable for leading the Nation's effort towards improving our Nation's health. The NCI-Center to reduce Cancer Health Disparities (CRCHD) under the dedicated leadership of Dr Sanya Springfield has championed the science and practice of reducing health inequities and advancing health equity. In an effort to guide Cancer Centers to be more responsive to the cancer burdens of their local communities, the CRCHD launched the National Outreach Network that includes the Community Health Educator (CHE) Award. City of Hope is aligning with the CRCHD thru the CHE mechanism to advance our health equity strategy and research. Key to all CHE activities are community informed and community based approaches to enhance our Cancer Center's relationship and presence in our catchment area and the local community to increase: 1) Culturally relevant partners, 2) Community capacity building, 3) Cancer prevention and early detection, 4) community health improvements, 5) stimulate advocacy and community inclusion in research, 6) ethnic minority participation in studies and 7) survivorship care. Our CHEs have established a network of multisectoral partners totaling 128, in partnership with many of these partners we conduct over 80 events each year reaching over 5,000 households each year to achieve our common aim of healthier communities and accelerating the greater public benefit of scientific advancements. Our annual Minority Cancer Awareness week forum that gathers diverse stakeholders with over 180 advocates, medical providers, researchers, health educators and even policy makers to be informed and activated for community health improvement and scientific engagement. One of our key project is to increase ethnic minority participation in research by implementing our Partnered in Access, Inclusion and Research (PAIR) initiative. This project promises significant contributions towards our goal of increasing underrepresented minorities - knowledge, acceptability and participation in cancer research including clinical trials (CT) and biospecimen studies (BB) via the confluence of two processes, one institutionally and the other community targeted: 1) Institutionally, we are weaving the CHE aims into the Cancer Center's research to build a functional and sustainable program for addressing health inequity by cultivating basic, translation, clinical and behavioral research that are responsive to our underserved and medically vulnerable groups in our catchment area; and 2) At the Community level we engage in bidirectional co-education to develop, implement and disseminate a training curriculum that will enable a network of community research navigators who can be our community research experts and liaison to address gaps in knowledge, medical mistrust, access, participation and engagement of underrepresented populations in research to speed up the applicability and utility of science to address health inequities.

Two specific CHE related activities include advancing: 1) The science and reach of a community-school based nutrition and physical activity, and health practices skill building project into wider community application with additional support for RWJF. This project emboldens teens, parents and community health workers to be seeds of change; and 2) Research engagement and enrollment by practicing these 7 core principles: cultural humility, linguistic and cultural competency, credibility, empathy, genuineness, graciousness and convenience that resulted in enrolling 153 Latinas within 4 community events.

Our approach and CHE activities have and will continue to contribute to the relevance and applicability of biomedical research advances to inform better healthcare and community health improvements among our increasingly diverse society.

Citation Format: Kimlin T. Ashing. Leveraging the NIH CHE P30 supplement as a platform to stimulate a cancer center strategic plan for addressing community cancer needs and enhancing health equity. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eighth AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 13-16, 2015; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2016;25(3 Suppl):Abstract nr IA06.