Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women of all ethnicities; and most common cause of death in Hispanic women. The Hispanic community forms a large part of Texas’s underserved and under-insured population. Successful outreach programs that are designed keeping this specific target population in mind are very important to be replicated in isolated populations of Texas to reduce the healthcare, quality of life and financial burden of breast cancer.

The Access to Breast Care for West Texas (ABC4WT) program was designed for the Texas Panhandle in 2010 to address breast cancer screening disparities for this geographically isolated area. It has been tremendously successf...

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Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women of all ethnicities; and most common cause of death in Hispanic women. The Hispanic community forms a large part of Texas’s underserved and under-insured population. Successful outreach programs that are designed keeping this specific target population in mind are very important to be replicated in isolated populations of Texas to reduce the healthcare, quality of life and financial burden of breast cancer.

The Access to Breast Care for West Texas (ABC4WT) program was designed for the Texas Panhandle in 2010 to address breast cancer screening disparities for this geographically isolated area. It has been tremendously successful in reaching Hispanic women and other minorities due to a variety of evidence-based approaches that resulted in a large public-private-community partnership in the area.

Our overall dissemination strategy is to develop replicable products, and to leverage the reach of our dissemination partners [Laura W Bush Institute of Women’s Health (LWBIWH), West Texas Area Health Education Center (AHEC), and Breast Health collaborative (BHC) of Texas] to reach the end users for program replication. The dissemination products from the ABC4WT project include: (i) Coalition building training program, (ii) Lay Public Educational Curriculum (the Women Inspiring, Serving and Educating (W.I.S.E) woman project), and (iii) Customizable outcome tracking database.

We intend to provide pre-service training, in-service training, and ongoing consultations to end users employing both passive (e-mail blasts, websites, social media) and active dissemination strategies (webinar series with CME/CEU credits, project director’s guide, and hands-on training modules). This approach will help providers in remote areas to have ready access to our materials and jump-start their projects to efficiently and effectively address the healthcare access issues in their communities.

The overarching goal of this dissemination project is to develop, disseminate and assist with implementation of easily replicable products from a successfully executed ABC4WT program in other areas of the state. To achieve this goal, several dissemination partners such LWBIWH, West Texas AHEC, and BHC of Texas have been identified.

The proposed dissemination model is an innovative model that addresses the access needs, and offers a comprehensive approach to flow of care via process maps, and accurate outcome documentation to be able to foresee the long-term impact. The specific creative components include (i) The Coalition Building Training program – this program was designed using a variety of evidence-based team building approaches from corporate and healthcare sectors with a specific focus on the cultural competencies to address minority communities; (ii) W.I.S.E. curriculum – this a sixth grade level breast health curriculum developed specifically for lay community activists; and (iii) Outcome Tracking Database – this is a user-friendly electronic tracking tool that can be used to compute the impact of interventions in the community. This also serves as great audit tool.

This dissemination project has a potential to uniquely impact the breast healthcare access issues in Texas. This model, when replicated in different areas, will allow local communities to scale the project in other areas of healthcare.

Overall, this project will fast-track achievement of the cancer control mission by addressing the needs of most vulnerable communities. Importantly, the relationships built as a result of this project will foster other creative partnerships within these communities for overall progress in non-health related fields as well (we have witnessed this in Panhandle). The data component of this project will allow a large data-set within Texas to be studied and leveraged for policy and systems change which would be of great interest to policy makers and other stakeholders.

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