Nosotros Comprometidos a Su Salud awarded NCI grant to improve liver cancer education in underserved communities

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Nosotros Comprometidos a Su Salud recently received a $200,000 Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG) supplement from the National Cancer Institute to improve cancer education in underserved populations through multichannel communication campaign.

Through the funding, University of Arizona investigators David O. Garcia, PhD, FACSM, and Adriana Maldonado, PhD, MA, are partnering with El Rio Community Health to create the culturally tailored educational campaign to improve liver disease and cancer health literacy in Mexican-origin communities.

“We hope to bring awareness to a disease and cancer outcomes that affect our Mexican-origin community in a significant way,” said Dr. Garcia, director of Nosotros Comprometidos a Su Salud and an associate professor in health promotion sciences. “We want to continue to take incremental steps in reducing the burden of this disease.”

The campaign began in October and will continue until March 2024, with final completion expected in September 2024.The Nosotros Comprometidos a Su Salud team and El Rio Health Center has been working with a media firm to create content for the project.

The six-month community campaign includes display advertisements in local convenience stores, social media, radio and television, animated story boards and testimonial commercials.

The advertisements direct viewers to a liver scan website the team developed in English and Spanish. Viewers can have the opportunity to receive a FibroScan® and one-on-one educational sessions about liver disease and liver cancer from the Nosotros team and community health workers called promotoras.

“We also will collaborate with the University of Arizona Cancer Center's Community Outreach and Engagement team to provide cultural tailoring of materials to focus on increasing cancer education and health literacy among the Mexican-origin community,” Dr. Garcia said.

Dr. Maldonado said they hope to recruit more than 600 participants for this study. To evaluate the program, the team will conduct a cross-sectional community survey to discover participants’ health literacy, liver cancer prevention beliefs and liver cancer prevention behaviors in addition to basic demographic information.

“We will use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the campaign’s reach, monitor its implementation and ensure that culturally and linguistically appropriate campaign materials are being produced and disseminated,” said Dr. Maldonado, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona’s Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

After assessing changes in knowledge and public awareness of liver disease and liver cancer risk factors in participants, the team will conduct focus groups to assess the participants’ attitudes toward the educational campaign for the campaign material’s cultural and linguistic appropriateness, clarity, appeal and effectiveness.

 “Our goal is to bring awareness to a disease and cancer outcome that affects our Mexican-origin community in a significant way,” Dr. Maldonado said. “We want to continue to take incremental steps in reducing the burden of this disease.”