The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #42200

Nofirstname Scout, ABD and Judith Bradford, PhD. The Fenway Institute, Fenway Community Health, 7 Haviland St., Boston, MA 02115, 646-528-7506, scoutdc@aol.com

Background: The documented higher smoking rates of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations make it necessary to maximize the availability and appropriateness of anti-tobacco programs to these groups. There are few data that examine the appropriateness of existing smoking cessation programs to these distinct populations. Also, little is known about the barriers that community medical centers face in launching new anti-smoking programs. At the same time, LGBT communities have gained wisdom in behavior modification strategies through other activities, notably HIV risk reduction and political organizing. This program seeks to bring together groups of LGBT members to examine community-specific barriers, and build on a diverse base of knowledge to develop and incubate promising new anti-tobacco projects.

Methods: Fenway Community Health is working with two of the other major LGBT health centers, Howard Brown Community Center, and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center, to convene three workgroups, one in each host city. Each workgroup will be comprised of health programmatic professionals, peer leaders, and community leaders. These groups will be pre-trained on salient information about anti-tobacco activities, then put in a room with tobacco experts to use community-specific barriers and knowledge as a basis to help tailor a promising new anti-tobacco project. These nascent projects will then be refined and incubated to the point where they are launched in early 2003. The work is in process, to be completed in Summer, 2002.

Discussion: This project offers an interesting approach to using community input to tackle an existing public health problem.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the methods of pulling community expertise to generate new tobacco intervention ideas as used by this project.
• Describe the different spheres of activity that influence a community-health center's ability to incorporate a new anti-tobacco project.
• Describe the new tobacco intervention strategies that have emerged from this project.

Keywords: Tobacco Control, Community

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.