Social-Ecological Model to Intervention to Ensure Early Breast Cancer Screening among African-American Women - Report Example

At this level, the primary goal is to help specific organizations/institutions create an environment that encourages and ensures early screening among the target population. Specific strategies in this regard include: using provider reminder systems; and reducing structural barriers to screening.

Individual healthcare organizations and/or institutions also need to take steps to help African-American women to go for screening more often. On the other side of client reminders, for instance, there are provider reminder systems. These are either manually or electronically generated messages that inform providers when a patient is due or overdue for screening. It is an important follow-up tool(CDC, 2014). These organizations/institutions should also reduce structural barriers to screening. These are noneconomic obstacles and/or burdens to screening. Among other things, they can expand clinical hours and offer services in nonclinical (that is alternative) settings.

Figure 1: SEM Intervention to Ensure Early Breast Cancer Screening among African-American Women

• Community Level

Here, the idea is to develop appropriate formal and informal relationships that would provide much-needed support for the goal of this intervention plan. Specific strategies include church-based interventions; creating support strategies for patients to establish medical homes; and community-based participatory research (CBPR).

The churchcan be a valuable platform for offering health promotion activities. Such projects have been successful before. In North Carolina, there was the Forsyth County Cancer Screening Project, which helped to improve screening rates among African-American women from low-income households. The project recorded a 31-56 percent increase in the proportion of women in the area having regular mammography (Coughlin, 2014). Creating a support system for patients looking to establish medical homes is also important. This involves a system-based approach to a patient-centered care that is comprehensive, coordinated and accessible.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) can also be important in this respect. The pillars of CBPR are: ethics, community empowerment, breaking the cycle of poverty, action research and participatory research (Blumenthal, 2011). These pillars can go a long way in improving the livelihoods of the target population (in this case the African-American women). CBRP seems to adopt a more holistic and inclusive approach to health intervention.

• Policy Level

In this respect, the objective is to advocate for African-American women, with the aim of having government institutions create policies that would facilitate the target population’s access to screening services. Many policies can be enacted toward this goal. Particularly, such policy should focus on the barriers that prevent African-American women from having access to breast cancer screening services (CDC, 2014; Moore et al., 2015).These include: funding for patient navigation (for patient follow-up); community screening projects; reducing costs (that is, out-of-pocket costs); mandatory awareness campaigns, among others.

Conclusion

The basic premise of this intervention paper is that African-American women are largely marginalized in the fight against breast cancer. More of them die from it, compared to the white women, and this is to a large extent attributable to social factors. The purpose of this SEM-based intervention, therefore, was to propose solutions to the social factors that are being barriers to the existing intervention efforts. Ultimately, this paper suggests solutions are the individual, interpersonal, organizational/institutional, community and policy levels. Particularly, these include: awareness campaigns, follow-up strategies and tools, family/caregiver support, church-based intervention (as a community-based strategy), and cost-reduction, among others. There is certainly more to breast-cancer intervention, but these suggestions are a good way to begin.