Breast Cancer
Breast Cancer Overview
Breast cancer is a health problem that causes the breast cells to grow uncontrollably, forming a lump of cells called a tumor. The tumor can remain in the breast or travel to other body parts creating new tumors, a condition known as metastasis. This uncontrollable growth is diverse and depends on the cells undergoing rapid growth, defining the different types of breast cancer. In females between the years of 20-59, breast cancer claims the highest mortality rate and is only second to skin cancer (BCPP, 2022). Breast cancer affects both women and men but is more prevalent in women.
Vulnerable Population Overview
This health promotion program proposal aims to explore breast cancer and its interaction with the black minority community in the USA. The program will also address intervention protocols that will be crucial in addressing the condition. The health promotion program to be implemented will involve promoting mammography screening and educational campaigns on cancer awareness. The proposed outcomes in this study will involve better cancer awareness among the community and improve the permeation of cancer screening services by including a mobile screening service. It can be accomplished by providing mobile mammography equipment. The educational campaign is achieved by creating reading material, including pamphlets and brochures, and education sessions in designated places of worship, one of the black community’s important institutions.
Literature Review
The black community in America accounts for 46.8 million of the total population in the USA (Tamir, 2021). The African American population is particularly vulnerable to many health complications fueled by the social and economic disparities they experience compared to their non-black counterparts. In the case of breast cancer, factors including less routine screening exercises and lower access to treatment are crucial constituting factors to this phenomenon. In addition, studies have shown that there is a lower likelihood for women of color in America to get screening services after they are diagnosed with an abnormal mammogram.
Therefore the black population faces immense challenges with breast cancer regarding their social-economic situations. Additional factors that affect this population and the prevalence of breast cancer in the community are low health insurance coverage and inadequate access to health care. The socio-economic environment of black women with breast cancer exacerbates these circumstances. For instance, black women’s income averages 5,500 US dollars a year, with higher poverty and unemployment rates than their white counterparts (Demographics, 2018). All these factors make the population more vulnerable to disease prevalence, and in this case, breast cancer.
Interventions
There have been interventions that have been done to help in improving the quality and awareness of the black community on breast cancer. The first intervention that has been used is mass media to increase awareness of cancer screening services. It has included radio stations that target African American populations, including the WQHT in New York and WVEE-FM in Atlanta, Georgia. These radio stations have invested in black airtime programming like on-air interviews (Miles, 2020). It can reach black community members, including women, men, and the elderly. Awareness creation has also been explored with the breast cancer awareness movement, including Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
This intervention has been crucial in increasing mean cancer-oriented RSV by 180.1 percent (Patel et al., 2020). It is specific to the women. Cancer awareness movement for men did not significantly increase the RSV cancer-specific percentage (Patel et al., 2020). Another beneficial intervention identified has been the ACCURE Program which translates to Cancer through Undoing Racism and Equity. The program caters to both white and black cancer patients. The program is designed to help black people suffering from cancer overcome hurdles they face when seeking cancer treatments, including physician miscommunication, limited transportation access, and mistrust of medical establishments.
It is done through training nurses to react to these hurdles. Secondly, the program also ensures nurses can provide extra care services to enhance the treatment completion rate. The nurses would help those unable to reach the threshold that would avail them of specialized care, including meeting appointment schedules (Cancer Institute, 2021). Their telehealth services provide these cancer services to black patients who could not access healthcare services due to transport constraints. The program also ensures accountability among the nurses by ensuring that the treatment completion rate among the white and black patients is kept up to date.
Health Intervention Model
The breast self-exam model serves as the best guiding framework for this proposal. It is a crucial tool for self-awareness for community members suffering from breast cancer. The model is oriented towards helping women know the natural functioning and state of their breasts and helping them detect and report any changes to this state to the health professionals (Edco, 2020). The model includes a standard kit model that demonstrates BSE in front of groups. It explains how to conduct the self-exam test while incorporating breast care printed booklet on the clinical exams, mammograms, and the responsibilities of breast self-exam models to the timely detection and interventions on breast cancer.
In conclusion, this research proposal is an investigation of the health promotion strategies that can be applied among the African American population to combat breast cancer. It also tackles the problems that result in the disparity of healthcare quality between the black American population and the white population. The proposal is a presentation of methodologies that if emphasized through resource application, can be used to provide better care for the African American population.
References
BCPP. (2022). African American Women and Breast Cancer – Breast Cancer Prevention Partners (BCPP). Breast Cancer Prevention Partners (BCPP). Retrieved 5 March 2022, from https://www.bcpp.org/resource/african-american-women-and-breast-cancer/#:~:text=In%20the%20US%3A&text=African%20American%20women%20have%20a,American%20women%20than%20White%20women.
Cancer Institute, N. (2021). System-Wide Changes Can Help Reduce Cancer Disparities. National Cancer Institute. Retrieved 5 March 2022, from https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021/black-white-cancer-disparities-survival-accure.
Demographics, B. (2018). Black Women Statistics – BlackDemographics.com. BlackDemographics.com. Retrieved 5 March 2022, from https://blackdemographics.com/population/black-women-statistics/.
Edco, H. (2020). Educational Resources For Breast Cancer Awareness. Health Education. Retrieved 5 March 2022, from https://www.healthedco.com/breast-cancer-awareness-models-and-teaching-tools.
Miles, R. (2020). Closing the Gap: Disparities in Breast Cancer Mortality among African American Women. Radiology: Imaging Cancer, 2(5), e200124. https://doi.org/10.1148/rycan.2020200124
Patel, M., Halpern, J., Desai, A., Keeter, M., Bennett, N., & Brannigan, R. (2020). The success of Prostate and Testicular Cancer Awareness Campaigns Compared to Breast Cancer Awareness Month According to Internet Search Volumes: A Google Trends Analysis. Urology, 139, 64-70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urology.2019.11.062
Tamir, C. (2021). The Growing Diversity of Black America. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. Retrieved 5 March 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/03/25/the-growing-diversity-of-black-america/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Black%20population%20is,than%20in%202000%20as%20we
