Health Educators play a significant role in cancer prevention and control. According to the Department of Labor, Health Educators work to encourage healthy lifestyles and wellness through educating individuals about behaviors that can prevent diseases. By providing cancer education programs to patients, Health Educators successfully improve patients’ health literacy, cancer screening rates, adherence to treatment and lifestyle changes, and communication with clinicians.

With the rapid progress in cancer genomics, personalized health care services are becoming a trend in cancer control. Based on family history risk assessments, patients can receive cancer prevention recommendations tailored t...

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Health Educators play a significant role in cancer prevention and control. According to the Department of Labor, Health Educators work to encourage healthy lifestyles and wellness through educating individuals about behaviors that can prevent diseases. By providing cancer education programs to patients, Health Educators successfully improve patients’ health literacy, cancer screening rates, adherence to treatment and lifestyle changes, and communication with clinicians.

With the rapid progress in cancer genomics, personalized health care services are becoming a trend in cancer control. Based on family history risk assessments, patients can receive cancer prevention recommendations tailored to their genomic profiles. Clinicians often struggle, however, to provide personalized care due to time restrictions, lack of cancer genomic competencies, failure to collect comprehensive family history information, and patients’ low health literacy.

Given their large numbers, credentials, and expertise in facilitating behavior change, Health Educators are ideal candidates for providing fundamental personalized cancer genomics education to patients. Nevertheless, Health Educators also lack adequate cancer genomic competencies. As such, this project proposes the development of the first cancer genomics training program for Texas Health Educators.

This project comprises a Website for professional interactions in a virtual community, a Web-based curriculum, and three skills-building professional CEU workshops for Texas Health Educators. Beyond a traditional approach focused on increasing trainees’ knowledge, our project addresses modifying professional behaviors and modifying theoretical mediators which shape such behaviors. Success of this project will be measured by a summative (impact) evaluation of Health Educators’ behaviors (and their mediators) and by a formative (process) evaluation of the program delivery.

This project will impact the provision of cancer control services by increasing Texans’ cancer genomics health literacy, their collection and utilization of cancer family history information, and communication with clinicians regarding their needs for personalized cancer genomic services.

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