Electronic Poster Presentations

     ¡Celebremos La Vida! is a long-standing community program for underserved and uninsured Hispanic women over 40.  Its mission is to provide free breast and cervical cancer screening, health education and follow-up care in culturally competent ways. In this presentation, we aim to share our experience, covering evaluation challenges and prospects, and lessons learned.  We will discuss the successes and failures of a pilot evaluation of patient navigation. We will also present a close examination of one Celebremos site in a rural community and the different – yet surprisingly similar – challenges a rural program faces as compared to the two Washington, DC sites.
     Celebremos was developed by the Prevent Cancer Foundation in 1994 to address many barriers in healthcare faced by Hispanic women over 40: language and cultural differences, difficulty navigating the health system, lack of insurance and financial constraints. The program began in the Washington, DC, metro area at the Spanish Catholic Center and added a second site at the Georgetown University Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center a few years later. In 2004, Celebremos expanded to the Family Health Partnership Clinic in McHenry County, Illinois, to address the needs of the Hispanic community outside an urban setting.  All three sites have collaborative partnerships with stakeholders from their respective communities. Celebremos seeks to overcome many of the barriers to care by providing free cancer prevention screenings for breast and cervical cancer, employing bilingual/bicultural staff and patient navigators, and accepting participants regardless of legal status. Celebremos provides this comprehensive, culturally sensitive program to 560 women each year and has reached over 4,200 women since its inception.
     Throughout the fourteen-year history of Celebremos, the importance of evaluation has grown, and the difficulty in collecting quality data across three sites has been evident. Efforts to collect and analyze reach statistics and patient satisfaction surveys have improved; a set of tools has been developed to capture information on patient navigation, a heralded component of the program. A pilot evaluation was launched in late 2007, targeting the three key groups impacted by patient navigation: the patient navigators themselves, follow-up care partners, and Celebremos participants. Relevant data will be presented, including successes and failures of the patient navigation evaluation.
     We will share an in-depth look at how the Family Health Partnership Clinic in McHenry County successfully implemented Celebremos in a rural setting. The Hispanic population in McHenry County increased 223.1% between 1990 and 2000 according to US census data. To reach this growing population, Celebremos collaborates with Centegra Health System, a major hospital system in the McHenry County area.  Once a month, Celebremos operates in the women’s health clinic at Memorial Hospital. As added encouragement to continue with regular medical care, Celebremos staff provides other activities for the participants and their families, such as healthy lifestyle workshops, makeup demonstrations and cancer prevention education for men. The goal is to provide a culturally competent setting for this Celebremos community to meet the various needs of women and their families.