Beyond the Manuscript
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Beyond the Manuscript
In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associate editors who handled the articles conduct our Beyond the Manuscript interviews. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Rachel Klimmek and Jennifer Wenzel authors of "Training of Community Health Workers to Deliver Cancer Patient Navigation to Rural African American Seniors" and PCHP Editor-in-Chief Darius Tandon.
Rachel and Jennifer. Thanks for such a wonderful article submitted and accepted to PCHP called "Training of Community Health Workers to Deliver Patient Navigation to Rural African American Seniors".
At the starting point, could you give us a brief summary of the project described in the manuscript, including the purpose of the overall study and some of the results that you presented in the manuscript?
The purpose of this project was to help us develop an intervention study focused on navigating rural African American seniors, both patients and their support persons or care partners—however or whichever term people prefer—on helping them to navigate them through the process of diagnosis and treatment.
This project is nested within some other projects including a cancer screening project conducted in East Baltimore at the time, with a group from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. It also folds into another pilot study that I'm working on with my collaborators at the University of Virginia and here at Johns Hopkins looking at decisions related to selecting treatment in an advanced cancer population.
It also has to do with some work that Rachel is working on as well.
Great.
I'm Rachel. I'm a doctoral candidate here at The Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and as a cancer nurse and I'm very interested in care of older adults in rural areas with cancer, as well as issues related to survivorship.
This study really fit very well in with that and out of this study I've currently planned a dissertation project, which is ongoing, where I'm looking at some of the things that came out of our interactions with the participants within this project we've described, which was a training of trainers.
Of community health workers [CHWs] who are in the rural communities and who are positioned to work with older adults and their support persons in terms of helping them navigate through the treatment process. I'm continuing to follow some of the older adults and support persons who are a part of some of the studies that Jennifer just described that has come out of this. [End Page 175]
The project we describe in the paper is just one element that helped build a foundation for these ongoing projects. Doing some capacity building with community health workers in the area and Jennifer perhaps will help also, as this is part of her larger program of research describe how the findings from this project fit into other ongoing projects.
One of the reasons for describing the whole spectrum of studies is that this training was developed as an early phase as a companion to all of these studies in that community health workers are being used across the different studies in different ways.
In some of the studies the community health workers are actually actively navigating through providing for example, in the Decision Support Study providing the decision aid. In all of these studies the community health workers are supported an oncology nurse, so that is an important component and we certainly built in some of those interactions into the training.
The other unique aspect of the project is that in all of these studies again, we're focusing not just on patients, but we're focusing really on patient and support person dyads. So there is this idea that the support persons can also be doing a significant portion of the navigation and developing training that would be appropriate for...
