Promoting informed prostate cancer screening decision-making for African American men in a community-based setting.

Purpose: Current screening guidelines for prostate cancer (PCa) encourage men to make individual screening decisions after consulting with their primary care provider to weigh the risks and benefits of undergoing prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing, but many men at high risk of PCa diagnosis (notably African American men) are more likely to be uninsured and lack a primary care provider. An academic-community partnership redesigned its community-based screening program to ensure access to services for African American men, incorporating a session with a trained clinical educator in community settings, designed to increase knowledge and promote informed decision-making regarding PSA testing. This study evaluated effects of the intervention on decision-making outcomes.

Enhancing organizational health literacy in a rural Missouri clinic: a qualitative case study.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a collaborative effort between a health care organization and academic institution to strengthen organizational health literacy.

Design/methodology/approach: The intervention took place at a rural, federally qualified health clinic in Missouri between May 2009 and April 2011. Qualitative interviews of key informants were conducted before (=35) and after (=23) the intervention to examine program implementation and success in effecting organizational change.

An Unexpected, Yet Welcomed Outcome of the St. Louis Healthy Start Program.

Introduction Racial disparities in birth outcomes are a significant problem in the U.S. The St.

Organizational factors related to the adoption of an injury prevention program by U.S. children's hospitals.

Most childhood injuries can be prevented with the correct use of safety devices and appropriate supervision. Children's hospitals are well positioned to promote these behaviors with evidence-based programming; however, barriers exist to adopting such programs. The purpose of this study was to describe organizational and administrative factors related to the adoption of an efficacious injury prevention (IP) program by children's hospitals in the USA.

Becoming a health literate organization: Formative research results from healthcare organizations providing care for undeserved communities.

Background Integrating health literacy into primary care institutional policy and practice is critical to effective, patient centered health care. While attributes of health literate organizations have been proposed, approaches for strengthening them in healthcare systems with limited resources have not been fully detailed. Methods We conducted key informant interviews with individuals from 11 low resourced health care organizations serving uninsured, underinsured, and government-insured patients across Missouri.

Comparing State Legislative Aides' Perspectives on Tobacco Policymaking in States With Strong and Weak Policies: A Qualitative Study.

Purpose: The study compared perceptions of state legislative aides about tobacco policymaking in states with strong and weak tobacco control policies.

Approach: Qualitative in-depth interviews carried out in 2009.

Setting: The US states were ranked on a combination of tobacco prevention funding, taxes, and presence of smoke-free policies.

Translating an Evidence-Based Injury Prevention Program for Implementation in a Home Visitation Setting.

Safe N' Sound (SNS), a computer-based childhood injury prevention program, provides individually tailored information to parents about their child's injury risks with specific behavioral recommendations. We translated SNS for implementation in a home visitation organization in order to increase its capacity to effectively address injury prevention and decrease the burden of injury experienced by high-need families. The aim of this study was to identify behavioral and organizational barriers and facilitators to translating and implementing SNS in a home visitation setting.

Assessing Community-Based Injury Prevention Services in U.S. Children's Hospitals.

Objective: Not-for-profit hospitals are required to meet federal reporting requirements detailing their community benefit activities, which support their tax-exempt status. Children's hospitals have long provided community injury prevention (IP) programming and thus can inform public health outreach work in other areas. This work describes IP programming as a community service offered by children's hospitals in the U.

Challenges and Opportunities with Empowering Baby Boomers for Personal Health Information Management Using Consumer Health Information Technologies: an Ecological Perspective.

"Baby Boomers" (adults born between the years of 1946 and 1964) make up the largest segment of the population in many countries, including the United States (about 78 million Americans) [1]. As Baby Boomers reach retirement age and beyond, many will have increasing medical needs and thus demand more health care resources that will challenge the healthcare system. Baby Boomers will likely accelerate the movement toward patient self-management and prevention efforts.

Prostate cancer survivors as community health educators: implications for informed decision making and cancer communication.

Recent evidence questioning the effectiveness of prostate-specific antigen testing leave community-based prostate cancer (CaP) outreach programs with a dilemma between promoting screening and highlighting screening risks. CaP survivors are uniquely positioned to address this problem by drawing upon real-life experiences to share nuanced information and perspectives. While CaP survivors have historically been incorporated into outreach programs, little is known about their impact on psychosocial outcomes and their effectiveness compared to professional health educators.

Individual and community influences on adherence to directives in the event of a plague attack: survey results.

Objectives:   During a public health emergency, public health officials issue directives with actions people need to take to protect themselves. Past research has shown that adherence to these directives depends on individual beliefs and circumstances. This report presents new research about the effects of community factors on adherence.

Advancing organizational health literacy in health care organizations serving high-needs populations: a case study.

Health care organizations, well positioned to address health literacy, are beginning to shift their systems and policies to support health literacy efforts. Organizations can identify barriers, emphasize and leverage their strengths, and initiate activities that promote health literacy-related practices. The current project employed an open-ended approach to conduct a needs assessment of rural federally qualified health center clinics.

Young adults' perceptions about established and emerging tobacco products: results from eight focus groups.

Introduction: In order to sustain their market, tobacco producers target young adults through novel product design and marketing strategies. Public health professionals need to understand young adults' risks perceptions about and use of new tobacco products to best inform tobacco control interventions.

Methods: In 2009, researchers conducted 8 focus groups with 67 young adults stratified by self-reported tobacco use and nonuse, residence in rural and urban areas, and living in a state with or without a statewide smoking restriction policy.

Addressing the challenge of informed decision making in prostate cancer community outreach to African American men.

African American men are disproportionately affected by prostate cancer. This project adopted a community-based participatory approach to design and pilot test an educational outreach strategy that promotes informed decision making about screening among African American men in community settings in St. Louis, Missouri.

Disparities by race and ethnicity in cancer survivor stories available on the web.

Background: The rapid growth of eHealth could have the unintended effect of deepening health disparities between population subgroups. Most concerns to date have focused on population differences in access to technology, but differences may also exist in the appropriateness of online health content for diverse populations.

Objective: This paper reports findings from the first descriptive study of online cancer survivor stories by race and ethnicity of the survivor.

Influenza vaccination concerns among older blacks: a randomized controlled trial.

Context: Vaccination can decrease the morbidity and mortality caused by influenza, yet vaccination rates remain low, especially among minority groups. Previous studies have found that important barriers to vaccination include the fear of adverse reactions and concern that the vaccine causes influenza.

Background: This research aimed to assess the effects of messages designed to address concerns about the safety and effectiveness of vaccination among blacks aged >or=50 years.

Changing the conversation about prostate cancer among African Americans: results of formative research.

Objectives: To understand obstacles to and opportunities for improving prostate cancer communication to and within African American communities.

Design: Researchers conducted interviews with 19 community leaders and five focus groups with healthy men and survivors. The team also conducted process evaluations of two outreach projects in which survivors spoke to African American men about prostate cancer and screening.

Communicating with the public about emerging health threats: lessons from the Pre-Event Message Development Project.

Objectives: We sought to better understand the challenges of communicating with the public about emerging health threats, particularly threats involving toxic chemicals, biological agents, and radioactive materials.

Methods: At the request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we formed an interdisciplinary consortium of investigative teams from 4 schools of public health. Over 2 years, the investigative teams conducted 79 focus group interviews with 884 participants and individual cognitive response interviews with 129 respondents, for a total sample of 1013 individuals.

Applying projective techniques to formative research in health communication development.

This article describes a new approach to formative research in which projective techniques commonly used in psychological assessment were adapted for use in focus groups to help design colorectal-cancer screening materials for African American men and women. Participants (N = 20) were divided into six "design teams." Each team was given a selection of design supplies and asked to create and discuss a visual layout for screening materials.

A community-wide media campaign to promote walking in a Missouri town.

Introduction: Engaging in moderate physical activity for 30 minutes five or more times per week substantially reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, colon cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity, and walking is an easy and accessible way to achieve this goal. A theory-based mass media campaign promoted walking and local community-sponsored wellness initiatives through four types of media (billboard, newspaper, radio, and poster advertisements) in St Joseph, Mo, over 5 months during the summer of 2003.

Methods: The Walk Missouri campaign was conducted in four phases: 1) formative research, 2) program design and pretesting, 3) implementation, and 4) impact assessment.

What does the public want to know in the event of a terrorist attack using plague?

We used formative research to assess the information needs and information-seeking strategies with general public audience segments in response to a hypothetical attack using plague, and we pretested informational materials about plague. Twelve focus groups were conducted across the country, with 129 individuals being purposively sampled by ethnicity and place of residence. Across groups, participants wanted to understand: the nature of the threat of plague, how to protect themselves from transmission, how to detect exposure and symptoms, how to treat infection, and progress in apprehending perpetrators.