Individual and Community Effectiveness of a Cervical Cancer Screening Program for Semi-Urban Mexican Women

Abstract

The effectiveness at the individual and community level of an educational intervention to increase cervical cancer screening self-efficacy among semi-urban Mexican women was evaluated and changes in reported community barriers were measured after the intervention was implemented. The educational intervention was evaluated with a quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design and a control group, based on the Integrative Model of Behavior Prediction and AMIGAS project materials. For the intervention group, increased self-efficacy increased requests to obtain a Pap (p < 0.05). Barriers to obtaining a Pap were embarrassment and lack of time at the individual level, and lack of time, test conditions and fear of social rejection in the community's cultural domain. At both the individual and community levels, having more information about the test and knowing it would be performed by a woman were primary facilitators. Few women used medically precise information when referring to the Pap and cervical uterine cancer. Although the level of self-efficacy of the participants increased, barriers in the health system affect the women's perceived ability to get a Pap. Better care for users is needed to increase consistent use of the test. The study shows the importance of using culturally adapted, multilevel, comprehensive interventions to achieve successful results in target populations.

The Development of a Brief Jail-Based Cervical Health Promotion Intervention

“…In the "free" community, educational, outreach, and mass media interventions have been employed to promote cervical cancer screening and in some cases abnormal Papanicolaou (Pap) test follow-up. For example, culturally tailored educational interventions, one with a self-efficacy-building component (Figueroa-Muñoz Ledo, Márquez-Serrano, Idrovo, & Allen-Leigh, 2014) and another with the use of a lay health educator/patient navigator (Duggan et al, 2012) have been used to improve screening uptake among Latina women. Another novel intervention used a familyfocused educational approach to improve literacy and screening among Latina, Black, and Arab women (Williams et al, 2013).…”

Validity of a questionnaire on self-efficacy for Pap test adherence screening

“…CC is an important public health problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. Therefore, having a questionnaire in Spanish will be very useful in measuring the self-efficacy of women and developing interventions to increase it because enhancement programs result in increased screening rates ( 50 – 52 ). Findings suggest that the inclusion of self-efficacy information in entertainment programming may lead to beneficial health outcomes ( 35 ).…”

Causes for Late Diagnosis of Cervical Cancer in Three Colombian Border Regions and Strategies to Implement a Program for Its Control

“…(8,31,32) Developing strategies that can link screening, follow-up, and treatment with different perspectives at both individual and community levels can contribute to considerably lowering social barriers and promoting women participation in screening programs. (33) Likewise, some studies have concluded that culturally designed interventions are more effective in improving health results, even in chronic diseases, than standard care interventions. (34) One of the limitations of this study is that the sample size of the quantitative phase is small; this was because we took incident cases of only invasive disease in a period of a year and four months, in places of the country with low number of inhabitants.…”