Development of a Matrix for Prioritizing Interventions and Research to Address American Indian Cancer Disparities

The aim of the Southwest American Indian Collaborative Network (SAICN) is to reduce cancer disparities by closing the gap between community needs and the promise of cancer prevention and cure through participatory education, training and research programs. In an effort to provide data-driven recommendations and promote the use of relevant data in tribal communities, the SAICN Data and Evaluation Core considered such issues as measures of cancer disparity, cancer sites, interventions that address disparities, and the impact and costs of these interventions. To generate a limited list of recommended actions that control cancer, the core developed a comparison matrix that presented scientifically sound practices for use by community health decision makers in prioritizing activities that are likely to reduce their respective community's burden of cancer. In its current configuration the matrix consists of two parts. The first part considers those cancers for which prevention and early detection interventions exist (cervical, breast, colorectal, tobacco-linked) and the second part addresses cancers for which interventions are unknown or not well developed. Each part has a number of columns that list and characterize the interventions and a number of rows that list the disparity measures. In both parts the final three columns are for use by the community in establishing priorities. The matrix can be converted into a worksheet format that facilitates its use at the community level.