Pilot--Cancer Screening Education for Health Care Students

The goal of this pilot project is to educate students in entry-level health care programs to promote cancer screening with older adults from Afro-Caribbean sub-populations by developing and evaluating an educational module based on culturally-sensitive, multimedia case studies. Specifically, we will: a) Develop four culturally-sensitive, multimedia case studies that explore the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors toward cancer screening of older adults from different Caribbean regions; b) Integrate the case studies into a single educational module that can be used by at least four of the seven entry-level health care programs at Long Island University (nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy, physician assistant, respiratory care, social work, and speech and language pathology); and c) Evaluate the impact that the educational module has on the students' knowledge, attitudes, and clinical behaviors regarding cancer screening. We focus on students of health care professions other than medical doctors because LIU does not have a medical school, faculty from the named health care programs have successfully worked together on interdisciplinary curriculum development initiatives in the past, and health care practitioners from those disciplines tend to have frequent contact with many clients and regularly engage in preventative education. Future programs that emanate from this pilot project may develop a community education program for older minority adults, case studies focused on other minority sub-populations at high risk for cancer, evaluate the effectiveness of this educational module for entry-level programs in regions with less racial and ethnic diversity, compare the effectiveness of case studies utilizing audio and/or visual components to text-only case studies, and evaluate this module's effectiveness for interdisciplinary teaching.