Planning and Evaluation Core

PROJECT SUMMARY/ ABSTRACT – PLANNING AND EVALUATION CORE The Planning and Evaluation (P&E) Core of the Cancer Research and Education to Advance HealTh Equity (CREATE) Partnership will implement a comprehensive, mixed-method, and outcome-oriented evaluation of all CREATE’s activities and components. Using innovative evaluation methods that are integrated into all Partnership components, the P&E Core addresses its overarching goal: To develop, implement, and sustain a framework that drives rigorous ongoing evaluation to support the scientific and programmatic goals of the Partnership. To accomplish this, the Partnership proposes the following Specific Aims: 1) Leverage existing internal expertise within both institutions by engaging the Internal Advisory Committee (IAC) in internal planning and assessing research, core, and shared resource activities; 2) Implement an innovative, efficient, and rigorous mechanism for soliciting and evaluating new pilot projects and evaluating the progress of existing Partnership-sponsored projects; 3) Utilize the external evaluation expertise, provided by highly experienced, unbiased, multidisciplinary experts, of CREATEs Program Steering Committee (PSC) and Community Advisory Board (CAB), to achieve the Partnerships stated goals and objectives; 4) Build and maintain a continuous planning, evaluation, and tracking system using a approach to provide CREATE Partnership leadership with metrics to make data driven decisions throughout all Partnership activities and components. To achieve P&E Core aims, internal and external experts will be engaged including: 1) a collaborative Multiple Principal Investigator group (MPI); 2) a larger Executive Committee made up of the MPIs, Program Managers, CREATE Undergraduate Scholars Program director, Core and Shared Resource Leads, and an Evaluation Lead; 3) a multidisciplinary IAC; 4) a PSC composed of external members with appropriate scientific expertise; and 5) an external CAB made up of community partners organizations. CREATE MPIs will lead the planning component and an evaluation lead will direct all evaluation efforts independently of the MPIs. The expected impact is to: 1) advance cancer health equity in underserved communities in the Southern Border Region of California; 2) further increase SDSU’s cancer research capacities, 3) expand SDSU’s and UCSD’s cancer health disparities and community-engaged research, 4) build a pipeline of a diverse biomedical workforce, largely focused on undergraduate, graduate and medical students and early stage investigators underrepresented in the biomedical workforce. Based on the goals of the selected full and pilot projects included in this application, CREATE expects major advancements in reducing disparities related to the following areas: 1) contribute to the development of a novel therapeutic strategy to be tested in future clinical trials, 2) provide actionable information to stakeholders, regarding inequity in cancer patient’s access to telehealth and; 3) generate a novel multicomponent intervention that adapts care delivery to address reproductive health among rural and Hispanic female adolescent and young adult cancer survivors.