Sustaining a lay health worker training model: Pilot results from the North Carolina BEAUTY and Health project

The North Carolina BEAUTY and Health project has demonstrated that licensed cosmetologists in beauty salons are able to deliver health promotion messages to their clients and to help influence their health behaviors up to 12 months post-intervention. This new pilot project was designed to explore whether health messages developed in the BEAUTY project could be disseminated to a large number of African-American salons, stylists (and their customers) statewide. Formative data (including classroom observations in 3 beauty schools, 14 structured interviews with beauty school instructors, 17 interviews with salon owners, and 3 focus groups with 22 licensed cosmetologists) were collected from January 2005-March 2006 to determine the feasibility of providing training to stylists in beauty schools. We concluded that working to integrate health promotion materials for stylists in-training was too challenging in beauty schools, given licensing demands and an already intensive curriculum. However, we uncovered information that we believe provided an alternative option to working with beauty schools: Offering courses that would meet the cosmetologists' (annual) continuing education accrediting requirements. In January 2007 “We Do More than Just Hair: Techniques for Advancing Beauty and Health in the Salon” was approved as an 8hr continuing education course for the 12,319 licensed cosmetologists in the state of North Carolina. This presentation will focus on the training materials, marketing and recruitment strategies to enlist 150 licensed cosmetologists in 3 continuing education workshops, pre/post test results and 3 months follow-up to assess knowledge, attitudes, self-efficacy and facilitators and barriers to delivering messages to customers.