| Title |
Lay health educators within primary care practices to improve cancer screening uptake for South Asian patients: challenges in quality improvement
|
|---|---|
| Published in |
Patient preference and adherence, March 2017
|
| DOI | 10.2147/ppa.s127147 |
| Pubmed ID | |
| Authors |
AK Lofters, M Vahabi, V Prakash, L Banerjee, P Bansal, S Goel, S Dunn |
| Abstract |
Cancer screening uptake is known to be low among South Asian residents of Ontario. The objective of this pilot study was to determine if lay health educators embedded within the practices of primary care providers could improve willingness to screen and cancer screening uptake for South Asian patients taking a quality improvement approach. Participating physicians selected quality improvement initiatives to use within their offices that they felt could increase willingness to screen and cancer screening uptake. They implemented initiatives, adapting as necessary, for six months. Four primary care physicians participated in the study. All approximated that at least 60% of their patients were of South Asian ethnicity. All physicians chose to work with a preexisting lay health educator program geared toward South Asians. Health ambassadors spoke to patients in the office and telephoned patients. For all physicians, ~60% of South Asian patients who were overdue for cancer screening and who spoke directly to health ambassadors stated they were willing to be screened. One physician was able to track actual screening among contacted patients and found that screening uptake was relatively high: from 29.2% (colorectal cancer) to 44.6% (breast cancer) of patients came in for screening within six months of the first phone calls. Although physicians viewed the health ambassadors positively, they found the study to be time intensive and resource intensive, especially as this work was additional to usual clinical duties. Using South Asian lay health educators embedded within primary care practices to telephone patients in their own languages showed promise in this study to increase awareness about willingness to screen and cancer screening uptake, but it was also time intensive and resource intensive with numerous challenges. Future quality improvement efforts should further develop the phone call invitation process, as well as explore how to provide infrastructure for lay health educator training and time. |
X Demographics
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Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Canada | 1 | 50% |
| Unknown | 1 | 50% |
Demographic breakdown
| Type | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Members of the public | 2 | 100% |
Mendeley readers
The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 40 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.
Geographical breakdown
| Country | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown | 40 | 100% |
Demographic breakdown
| Readers by professional status | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Researcher | 7 | 18% |
| Student > Master | 7 | 18% |
| Student > Ph. D. Student | 4 | 10% |
| Lecturer | 2 | 5% |
| Other | 1 | 3% |
| Other | 4 | 10% |
| Unknown | 15 | 38% |
| Readers by discipline | Count | As % |
|---|---|---|
| Nursing and Health Professions | 9 | 23% |
| Medicine and Dentistry | 4 | 10% |
| Agricultural and Biological Sciences | 3 | 8% |
| Immunology and Microbiology | 2 | 5% |
| Economics, Econometrics and Finance | 1 | 3% |
| Other | 3 | 8% |
| Unknown | 18 | 45% |
Attention Score in Context
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 30 March 2017.
All research outputs
#16,870,248
of 25,584,565 outputs
Outputs from Patient preference and adherence
#978
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#200,501
of 324,971 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Patient preference and adherence
#37
of 51 outputs
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