Community Ministry of Prince George’s County

Abstract Project HEAL (Health through Early Awareness and Learning) is an evidence-based intervention rooted in health behavior change theory and aiming to increase cancer awareness and early detection through African American faith-based organizations. This study explored the potential for broader scale-up and dissemination of Project HEAL through the team's participation in a training program called Speeding Research-tested INTerventions (SPRINT). The SPRINT training was framed using tools from the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas to guide trainees in designing (1) compelling value propositions, (2) a minimal viable product, and (3) questions to gain critical insight from various stakeholders during a process called Customer Discovery. We report on our experiences in the SPRINT training and insights on intervention scale-up that we gained from the training, including key findings from 41 discovery interviews conducted with various stakeholders of the church ecosystem. We learned several valuable lessons from the discovery interviews, including the realization that scale-up will likely be more incremental than immediate. Additional refinement will be needed to scale up the intervention for “real world” application, including making our technology more user-friendly and including additional health topics beyond cancer. The SPRINT training helped our team consider broader scale-up and dissemination in a constituent-informed way. We discuss how insights from the training helped to refine our plans for future intervention scale-up. Citation Format: Laundette P. Jones, Jimmie L. Slade, Felicia Davenport, Sherie Lou Z. Santos, Cheryl L. Holt. Planning for scale-up of an evidence-based intervention in community settings: Project HEAL insights from the SPRINT Initiative [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2018 Nov 2-5; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(6 Suppl):Abstract nr A024.

Health promotion interventions in African American communities are frequently delivered in church settings. The Men's Prostate Awareness Church Training (M-PACT) intervention aimed to increase informed decision making for prostate cancer screening among African American men through their churches. Given the significant proportion and role of women in African American churches, the M-PACT study examined whether including women in the intervention approach would have an effect on study outcomes compared with a men-only approach. The current analysis discusses the men's participation rates in the M-PACT intervention, which consisted of a series of 4 bimonthly men's health workshops in 18 African American churches. Data suggest that once enrolled, retention rates for men ranged from 62 to 69 % over the workshop series. Among the men who were encouraged to invite women in their lives (e.g., wife/partner, sister, daughter, friend) to the workshops with them, less than half did so (46 %), suggesting under-implementation of this "health partner" approach. Finally, men's participation in the mixed-sex workshops were half the rate as compared to the men-only workshops. We describe recruitment techniques, lessons learned, and possible reasons for the observed study group differences in participation, in order to inform future interventions to reach men of color with health information.