Raising Awareness About Women’s Cancer and Increasing Local Engagement With Healthcare Services in Haiti

Abstract

Abstract 37 Background: Project Medishare launched a breast cancer program in Port-au-Prince in 2013. In 2015, the program was expanded as part of a national breast cancer treatment program. Project Medishare is currently implementing a women’s cancer awareness campaign funded by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC). The program will explore and address the complex social and cultural narratives around women’s cancer in Haiti. This will be accomplished using human-centered design to build a communications tool-kit for community health workers. The program was conceived with local partners and the Haitian government. Both parties sought to increase breast and cervical cancer screening, as well as reduce the number of late-stage presentations. Methods: Project Medishare has adopted methods from Community-Based-Participatory-Research (CBPR) in order to identify and foster a community of actors involved in women’s health, and cancer screening and treatment in Haiti. Since September 2015, a group of 8 distinct Haitian organizations, including the government, make up a Community Advisory Board that conducts research and explores different programmatic approaches in the fight against breast and cervical cancer in Haiti. Results: Through creation of the advisory board and equitable partnerships with local organizations, the group has had success in fostering engagement and ownership over challenges presented by screening and treating cancer in a low-resource setting. The group designed and implemented a nationwide survey to document reasons why communities and individuals in Haiti do not engage with healthcare services provided until cancer is at an advanced stage, despite a basic awareness of the disease and visible symptoms. Once collected, the group will work towards a collective interpretation of the data and will determine how it should be used. Conclusions: Like academic institutions, CBPR methods can be invaluable to organizations researching barriers to care and addressing health inequalities in low-resource settings. Creating a community advisory board encourages local ownership of research outcomes and projects. Future endeavors will consist of sharing the resources created by CBPR and human-centered design, to build a network of partners and implement a national cancer awareness program to parallel our national comprehensive cancer program efforts. AUTHORS' DISCLOSURES OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: No COIs from the authors.