We have been awarded a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship to expand our research on mapping the health information networks in a rural region. The project addresses information disparities in the rural and impoverished San Joaquin Valley of California, and is grounded in the idea that information disparities are important contributors to health disparities. The public information environment is an important determinant of health, and the mass media are especially critical sources for information dissemination in rural regions with geographically-dispersed populations that are harder to reach with other channels. However, the unequal, socially patterned distribution of health information is compounded in rural regions that face multiple barriers to health, contributing to rather than eliminating disparities. 

In a current project, we are working to map the prevalence of health-related news in Merced County, a culturally diverse rural California county characterized by extremely high levels of poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment. Results so far demonstrate a limited information environment, and further suggest there is minimal actionable health information in local newspapers. 

The Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship will allow us to extend preliminary work to map the complete current health information environment, including news, entertainment, social media, and community storytelling networks, with the ultimate goal of developing an intervention that will improve both the quantity of health information available and the quality (usability) of that information. This project borrows heavily from Communication Infrastructure Theory, developed by Dr. Sandra Ball-Rokeach at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Southern California.

I'm pleased to announce that I have recently been awarded a new pilot grant from the UC Davis Latino Aging Research Resource Center. I will be part of the 2015-16 cohort of LARRC Scholars. The pilot grant has two complementary aims:

Aim 1. Develop and evaluate a research participation process that actively engages caregivers of Latino dementia patients with NPS in the development of a culturally tailored decision-making intervention.

Aim 2. Identify key themes in the experiences of caregivers of Latino dementia patients that may be used to develop a culturally tailored decision-making intervention.

The project is based on the premise that challenges in recruiting Latinos to participate in clinical research are similar to those posed in effective health communication, and that we can leverage theories and methods of communication science to increase participation of Latinos in clinical research. The goal of this project is to develop an effective mechanism for identifying and recruiting caregivers of aging Latinos into clinical research, in order to obtain data to design a culturally tailored intervention to assist caregivers in making decisions about treatment for their family member.    

I'm a Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine this month. My first day happened to coincide with the official kick-off of a pilot trial of a cervical cancer prevention media campaign led by amazing mentor, Dr. Lourdes Baezconde-Garabanati, and her team. So, we did what any excited group of community researchers would do: We went on a photo safari to document the launch of the campaign! It was so new that we caught the city maintenance crew in action, putting up the street signs. 

The campaign is called Es Tiempo ("It's Time") and features the beautiful lavender jacaranda tree in its imagery. The materials were developed in a unique partnership with advertising students from an art college in Los Angeles and the USC team. They were tested in the community but have never been formally launched until the current pilot, which is set to run for a month. The pilot features 64 street light flags, 24 small billboards, and 24 bus benches, all in the USC/LAC health sciences complex and Boyle Heights community. The goal of the campaign is to encourage Latinas to get up to date on cervical cancer screening. Along with the media campaign, there is a clinical education intervention component. 

It was so exciting to see the campaign go live - very rarely do health communication scientists actually get to see our "products" actually in the field! Seeing the incredible effort over many years that it took to get this campaign off the ground and into the information environment to have a chance at reducing cervical cancer disparities is so motivating. Thanks for letting me tag along on your big day, ladies!