Abstract for presentation at 11th International Congress of Human Genetics

The overall purpose of this project is to conduct an educational public health campaign in underserved communities to increase awareness of the association between family history and cancer. Research has shown the effectiveness of public health campaigns in increasing awareness and changing behavior. Specifically, the goal of this portion of the study is to increase the visibility of the Clinical Cancer Genetics (CCG) Program at The Ohio State University (OSU) in underserved communities, and therefore increase referrals to CCG and phone calls to OSU’s James Cancer Hospital’s information phone-line. To accomplish this goal, a team including behavioral scientists, physicians, cancer genetic counselors, and the cancer hospital’s marketing department are designing a public health campaign that will be targeted to 5 underserved, low socio-economic status, communities in the Columbus, Ohio area. The campaign will include a variety of media tools. This particular abstract reports on the impact of the public health campaign by measuring the pre-campaign numbers of 1) genetics-related calls to the phone-line, and 2) referrals to CCG. These numbers will be compared to the calls and referrals received during the campaign period. Preliminary estimates of one pre-campaign month for 1) number of genetics-related calls to the phone-line was 3.9% (3/76), and 2) number of referrals to CCG was 6 individuals (5/6 listed that they heard about CCG from their physician) (12/1/05-12/31/05). Our hypothesis is that the public health campaign will increase the number of calls and referrals during the campaign period. Preliminary data regarding pre-campaign calls and referrals, and data regarding these values during the campaign period, will be available at the time of presentation. Data regarding the source of where individuals heard about the CCG program will also be presented.