Promising Interventions to Prevent Liver Cancer in Idaho

The Idaho Comprehensive Cancer Control Program (ICCCP) collaborated with the Idaho Immunization Program (IIP) to plan and implement activities to increase knowledge and awareness of liver cancer prevention through tailored hepatitis B immunization messaging to the Idaho community and health care providers.

In this article, we report findings from an evaluation of these activities.

The two programs implemented liver cancer prevention activities between May 2017 and December 2017; strategies included a social media vaccination awareness campaign and health care provider education.

Facebook Insights was used to report, and descriptive statistics were used to analyze, data from the social media campaign. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze data collected from a retrospective pre-post survey for the health care provider presentations and paired t-tests were conducted to detect differences between pre- and postexposure.

For the social media campaign, ICCCP and IIP posted a total of 32 liver cancer and hepatitis B vaccination posts on their respective Facebook pages, which reached 42,804 unique users. For the health care provider presentations, there was a statistically significant increase in awareness, knowledge, ability, and intention among health care providers.

Our evaluation serves as an example of how public health social media can reach consumers and how educating providers can raise awareness on the importance of hepatitis B vaccination as a means of preventing liver cancer.