Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Our goal is to make sure all women with cancer get medical care that is consistent with what is important to them, no matter their race and ethnicity. To do this, we will work together with community health workers, who are trusted professionals that help connect people from their communities to medical care through education, support, and advocacy. Our past research shows that community health workers want to help cancer patients get the right care. They can do this by having conversations about advance care planning, which is a way for patients to think about the kind of medical care they would want if they became too sick to speak for themselves. However, community health workers need more training to have these conversations with patients. We will create a program to teach community health workers how to help patients with advance care planning. Next, we will improve the program by getting feedback from community health workers and making changes based on their suggestions. Finally, we will test this program by having community health workers have advance care planning conversations with cancer patients based on what they learned. We will then get feedback from both the patients they talk to and the community health workers to find out whether these conversations were useful. In the future, community health workers could work together with doctors to make sure that cancer patients get the right medical care so that they live as well as possible during their cancer journey.
