Dr. Michael A. Preston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Policy in the School of Medicine and serves as the Assistant Director for the Office of Health Equity and Disparities Research at the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. His expertise includes the development of health initiatives that provide roadmaps for engaging communities that tend to be underrepresented, rural, and under-resourced. Dr. Preston has been the principal or co-investigator of multiple funded grants focusing on the implementation of precision public health interventions, cancer health disparities, and health care reform. His scientific interests as a health services researcher are the development of strategies that reduce cancer health disparities. His research agenda includes examining components of health care reform and how provisions of the Affordable Care Act address cancer health disparities among poor, minorities, and underserved communities.
Questions & Answers
Several aspects of the program can be adapted to meet the needs of your community. The use of program staff can be adapted based on resources available in your community. For example, the academic health professional can be someone with a public health background if a provider is not available. In addition, materials may be adapted to provide statistics relevant to your community. This program may be adapted to various audiences that were not included in the research study, such as urban communities or groups that are not medically underserved.
Facilitators to implementation of this program are great community partners to assist with program implementation. Other facilitators to implementation include access to colorectal cancer screening stool-based kits and resources to assist participants with follow-up colonoscopy. Challenges include recruitment of participants due to a lack of transportation, distance to gastroenterology clinics, and a lack of role models in the community. These are some of the facilitators and barriers to implementation of the program that should be considered.
Suggested questions may include the following:
1. Who should be part of the program staff? Who should be in the role of the academic health professional? Who should be in the role of the community lay health worker? Who should serve as the role model for your program?
2. Was the training adequate enough for the needs of our program/community?
3. Should materials be revised to provide statistics relevant to your community?
4. What are the challenges to implementation of this program in your community?
5. What are the resources relevant to program implementation in your community?
My research activities include studying cancer health disparities among poor, minority, and underserved communities. In my research, applied economic, political, and statistical theory and methods to determine how social factors generate disparities and evaluated state and federal policy initiatives that reduce these disparities. Also designed an economic analysis of a state demonstration program that reduced screening barriers among low-income, uninsured, underinsured, and underserved populations. New research direction includes examining the design, implementation, and sustainability of effective evidence-based interventions/practices to eliminate cancer health disparities among medically underserved populations. Future research endeavors include examining the effects of the Medicaid Expansion on health disparities in underserved populations.