2014 PCRP Investigator Vignette

Title: Health Disparities PC Model and Training Outstanding Minority Leaders

Investigator: Folakemi Odedina, PhD; University of Florida

The most recent grant that I have is the Health Disparities Award and it's looking at developing a prostate cancer care and survivorship model. And essentially that model will help us to be able to design interventions to really improve how men-especially black men-deal with prostate cancer when they get a diagnosis of prostate cancer. We are going to look at prostate cancer patients in the State of Florida within the last five years, and we are going to collect the demographic data to find out whether they are native born black men, or whether they are African immigrants, or whether they're Caribbean immigrants. You have to understand that that data does not exist. Right now, the data that we have is you just check the box that you're black. So we don't know who is really truly born black and who is an immigrant and who is not.

So, we are going to go back and we're going to most probably interview about 10,000 prostate cancer patients in Florida and get this data from them. And once we get this data from them, we are going to be able to estimate what is the incidence of prostate cancer among those three different groups-that is number one. Number two, we're going to follow up in talking to 20 native born black men, talking to 20 African immigrants, and talking to 20 Caribbean black men, and we're going to conduct really in-depth focus group interviews that is going to ask them questions on the all prostate cancer continuum from prevention to survivorship. We want to get from them how have they handled their diagnosis of prostate cancer? What did they do for the prevention? What did this one do for treatment? What did they do for the survivorship? What regrets do they have? What recommendations; if they were going to go back again, how would they do it differently?

So once we do an in-depth study with all these men, then we're going to use what is known as ethnographic health methodology to build a theory to really look at the factors that impact prostate cancer care and survivorship among each of those groups. So we are actually going to build three models for the three different groups. And we are going to come out with specific products that is meant to help any black man that hears the words "you have prostate cancer." So it will help them to make the best decision for their life.

Another grant from the PCRP is called the ReTOOL Program, and the ReTOOL Program essentially allows us to be able to train undergraduate students in the area of prostate cancer research. And that's really an exciting program for us. What we essentially do is that we have outstanding scientists who are matched with undergraduate students, but the undergraduate students they come from minority institutions. They come from historically black colleges and universities, so we're working with Florida A&M University. We go through this rigorous process of picking the top five students every summer. We match them with five outstanding scientists at the University of Florida, and this summer we're going through a didactic curriculum on prostate cancer. Talk about prostate cancer etiology, you talk about prostate cancer biology, you talk about, you know, clinical factors in prostate cancer-all that realm; they take an exam, and they have to pass the exam before they move into the training section.

I think the most exciting part of the ReTOOL Program is that the students are then launched into a lab, whether it is in the community lab if they're doing community or behavioral sciences research, or a wet lab if they are really doing biological, and they spend about 10 weeks doing the study. And the overall goal is at the end of the 10 weeks that they spent, they have to have a presentation-oral presentation and a poster presentation-of their work. And their research has to be completed.

But in addition to that, they are required to spend about four hours a week within the community for them to get a better understanding of what prostate cancer disparities are here. They either volunteer at a community or they do some sort of research at a community level, and so they're able to have dialogue with the community and being able to do that.

Currently, we have 10 students who have passed through the program, and those 10 students they have their abstracts being accepted by the Health Disparities Conference, you know, they have gone on and have oral presentations at their institutions. We have about five of them working on peer review publications. So it really has been an outstanding program.

The devotion that we have to the students and the relationship that builds between the mentor and mentee is really a great way to move forward. So I see that as an important component of any research program.