Collaborative partnerships: A strategy to promote cancer screening in diverse communities

B25

Background: Team Up is a national pilot partnership among the American Cancer Society (ACS), U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Cancer Institute (NCI), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Program agents from each national agency collaborated with local affiliates in six states to: 1) establish and strengthen partnership synergy at state and county levels; 2) identify, adopt and implement evidence-based interventions; and 3) improve breast and cervical screening among the most underserved women. We hypothesized that specific dimensions of partnership functioning are directly related to a partnership’s synergy, a proximal indicator of success. With this focus, emphasis was placed on collaboration to create a system change and identify variations in state practice, identify how variations may affect achievement of programmatic goals either positively or negatively.
 Methods: Partnership members completed the Lasker and Weiss Partnership Self-Assessment tool four times over three years (2004-2007). The tool measures partnership collaboration processes (synergy), partnership functioning (leadership, management) and community-related challenges (communication). Semi-structured qualitative interviews supplemented the on-line Lasker and Weiss surveys.
 Results: Preliminary results suggest that state teams understand the purpose of their partnership, but the strength of partnerships and degree of synergy varied between state and national teams and over time. Teams with higher synergy scores (mean 3.8 out of mean 5.0) were more likely to accomplish program goals than those with lower scores.
 Conclusions: Partnerships and collaborations can be advantageous, especially more inclusive partnerships with broad participation and open communication. Group cohesion and recognition of goals throughout the life of a project are essential to partnership success, and to improve cancer screening in diverse communities.