Background: Family history, a risk factor for cancer, has been recognized as an effective public health genomic tool for cancer prevention. Community health workers (CHW) are lay community gatekeepers and frontline public health workers for serving underserved populations. Engaging CHWs in providing cancer family history (CFH)-related education and services hold the potential to promote cancer prevention and minimize cancer-related disparities. Nevertheless, CHWs are lack of CFH-related competencies. This study seeks to develop and evaluate a CFH-based online training program for CHWs in Texas.

Methods: Our CFH online training program, developed and delivered by a team of CHWs and CHW instructors with six state-approved CEUs, is theory- and evidence-based. It addressed CHWs’ core competencies (e.g., knowledge, advocacy, organizational, and service coordination skills) in providing CFH-related education, service, and outreach. Outcome assessments were evaluated at baseline, immediately-post-training, and 3-month follow-up.

Results: Most (80.1%) of 291 CHW trainees were Latinos/Blacks. Linear-mixed modeling showed that our training improved CHW trainees’ practice in CFH-related behaviors significantly from baseline to 3-month follow-up (P<0.001). Trainees’ CFH knowledge as well as attitudes, self-efficacy, and intention scores associated with CFH-related practice were significantly improved at post-training (Ps<0.05) compared to the baseline data. Yet, those post-training scores decreased at the 3-month follow-up (Ps<0.05). The feedback regarding the online training from CHW trainees was overall positive.

Conclusion: Our CFH online training program shows an initial success for improving CHWs’ CFH-related genomics competencies. A more rigorous randomized-controlled-trial study design is needed in the future to examine its efficacy further.