Photo-maps as innovative tools to enhance empowerment, research, and education

Every woman has a right to accessible health care, yet, when women with disabilities seek breast health screening, they often encounter providers and facilities that are ill-prepared, inaccessible, and poorly-equipped to serve them. Women's Independence Through Health ~ Universal Screening Solutions (WITH~USS) is a partnership forged between the Center for Independent Living of North Central Florida and the University of Florida's Public Health Program to better understand and address the factors that impact preventive care. We will discuss our on-going study aimed at assessing how feasible and beneficial it is for women with physical disabilities to team up with their health care providers in using the Photovoice method to “Photo-Map” an actual health care or mammography visit. Specifically, women and their providers are producing digital photographs that they feel capture and relay to others the key aspects of their visit that are barriers and facilitators to obtaining or providing regular breast cancer screenings. Working with the WITH~USS team, participants generate narrated slideshows from their photo-maps. Ultimately, these slideshows will be posted on an interactive website where viewers can provide comments that will help evaluate the photo-maps' capacity to serve as tools for enhancing empowerment (e.g., Do photo-maps provide an alternative avenue for voicing perspectives? Will viewers literally “see” the similarities/differences from their own experiences?), research (e.g., will photo-maps elicit insightful information from viewers?), and education (can photo-maps help raise public awareness about important accessibility issues?). We will discuss lessons learned from this pilot study and provide examples of actual photo-maps.