Shaping cancer center priorities through Community Advisory Board collaboration

Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) teams at National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer centers are tasked with engaging communities to understand and address the burden of cancer within their catchment area. This helps cancer center leadership identify priorities and develop strategic plans to reduce the cancer burden. University of Iowa Health Care Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center collaborates with its Community Advisory Board (CAB) to understand the needs and priorities of its catchment area, the state of Iowa.

The Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center's CAB is made up of diverse individuals from across the state, including community leaders and representatives from local hospitals, health departments, and nonprofits, who are dedicated to partnering with Holden Cancer Center to reduce the state's cancer burden. Holden Cancer Center's COE team engaged its CAB in conversations to establish a process to identify research, clinical, and outreach priorities for the Holden Cancer Center. Small- and whole-group dialogues during CAB meetings helped gauge important criteria for determining priorities. The COE team also conducted online surveys to quantitatively assess CAB perspectives on guiding criteria for Holden Cancer Center to consider when identifying priorities.

Over the course of three interactive meetings, CAB members refined and ranked criteria for selecting Holden Cancer Center priorities. The top guiding criteria identified by CAB members included barriers patients face to cancer treatment, screening, or clinical trials; preventable cancers; and achieving health equity or correcting health disparities in the state.

The COE team, Holden Cancer Center leadership, and CAB members are exploring avenues to inform Holden Cancer Center research and program planning with priorities developed using the CAB-identified guiding criteria. The multi-step process employed by Holden Cancer Center to engage community members in the identification and creation of priorities can be adapted by other cancer centers to ensure that institutional and community priorities are aligned.