In Massachusetts, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx communities resulting in higher infection rates as well as increased unemployment, loss of health insurance, and interruptions in medical care such as cancer screenings and appointments.

Latinx-serving community-based organizations (CBO’s) in the cities of Boston and Worcester have been on the front lines responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating access to healthcare, COVID testing, and vaccinations for underserved Latinx.

The aim of this pilot project is to understand how Rapid Cycle Quality Improvement (RCQI) approaches can be used with Latinx-serving Community-Based Organizations (CBO’s) in order to build their capacity to address the negative impacts that COVID-19 has had on Latinx communities’ ability to access cancer prevention, screening, and care. RCQI is an emerging technique to design and monitor health system interventions frequently used in health care, academic, and community-based settings (Leatherman et al., 2010). Researchers will partner with Latinx-serving CBO’s and their stakeholders to use RCQI methods for analyzing the data CBO’s have collected during the COVID-19 pandemic with special attention to cancer care interruptions. By using RCQI approaches CBO’s can strengthen their organizational capacity to help multilingual and multicultural populations that are disproportionately at risk for COVID infection and more likely to experience cancer disparities.

Principal Investigators:

Lorna Rivera, Ph.D, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Jarvis T. Chen, Sc.D., Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center

Jaime Vallejos, MD, MPH, Worcester State University

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The Seed Project Uncovering the Health Care Experience of Brazilian Immigrant Cancer Patients in Massachusetts aims to describe the treatment pathways of Brazilian immigrant cancer patients in Massachusetts. It will interview 20 Brazilian cancer patients in Massachusetts. The study is led by faculty from UMass Boston and DF/HCC in collaboration with community leaders and Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA).

The findings of this study have the potential to contribute to new knowledge about the cancer treatment pathways of Brazilian immigrant cancer patients in Massachusetts, including the mental health implications of the treatment. The data may be useful for improving the cancer treatment pathways of Brazilian and other Portuguese speaking communities in Massachusetts.

Investigators:

Dr. Anna Revette and Dr. Eduardo Siqueira

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The Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19 seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the City of Boston implementation of evidence-based health literacy strategies that are culturally appropriate to enhance COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and/or other mitigation measures (e.g., public health prevention practices and vaccination) in racial and ethnic minority populations and other socially vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic minority communities.

The Mauricio Gastón Institute partnered with the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) to evaluate the activities of the project. The Gastón Institute and the BPHC will develop and implement health literacy strategies for our focus populations. Some activities will be broad-based; others will use culturally and linguistically appropriate messages focused on specific groups and tailored to their concerns, hopes and interests—e.g., Haitian- Americans, Brazilian immigrants, younger Latinx men, LGBTQ youth, parents of young children.

Investigators:

Dr. Lorna Rivera, Executive Director of the Mauricio Gastón Institute

Dr. Eduardo Siqueira, Associate Professor at the School for the Environment.

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COVID-19 disproportionately affects communities of color in Massachusetts resulting in higher infection and death rates; this disparity is coupled with an acutely inequitable vaccine rollout. The resulting societal costs include increased economic and housing insecurity, interrupted education, and social isolation. In this context, a collaborative of researchers and policy professionals across institutions and regions, with decades of history working together on equity-centered initiatives, joined forces to create The Collaborative for Latinx Health Equity. The vision is to advance effective solution scenarios by creating a shared platform of knowledge connected to an ecosystem of action-learning decision makers, high impact connectors, and community action actors.

The Collaborative’s Health Equity Knowledge Hub assists in the development of equitable solutions to major equity and health challenges by creating platforms to manage data, analysis, and evidence in order to monitor, measure, and explain equity gaps. This process of translating existing knowledge into clear, actionable recommendations will be accomplished through building a network among multi-sector stakeholders and by sharing and co-creating knowledge and building capacities of community practitioners.

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