Barriers to effectiveness of the Every Woman Matter program

¶ … Program to Promote Positive Health Behaviors

The screening practice for disease has been identified as an effective tool to save lives, reduce suffering and reduce health care costs. While a periodic screening for cervical and breast cancer has been identified as an effective tool in reducing a level of burden of disease in women, however, many screening practices fall short of a recommended practice thereby leaving patients to face unnecessary risks. Barriers to cancer screening exist at different levels at physician, patients and practice systems. The EWM (Every Woman Matter) is a state-organized program and federally-funded program to eliminate barriers to prevent cervical and breast cancer screening. The program focuses on raising public awareness on the risks associated to breast cancer and make the screening more accessible to all low-income women. The goal of the program is also to allow eligible women to receive a Papanicolaou smear test, mammography, and clinical breast examination at reduce costs.

Although, the EMW program intends to deliver health service for women, however, the level of cervical and breast cancer screening still fall short of the ideal. Numerous attempts to enhance a preventive service delivery deliver no magic bullet to change practice and physician behaviors.

Objective of this paper is to investigate the reason the Every Woman Matter was not effective. The paper also identifies two successful programs for the cancer screening and characteristics that made the programs effective.

Reasons the EMW Program had not met its Goals

Different factors have prevented the EMW not being able to meet their goals. The financial reason is one of the major factors that makes the program not be able to realize its goals. Typically, the program targets women with low incomes, and by consequence, these group of women are unable to afford the high costs of regular medical checkups. Moreover, millions of low income women do not have health insurance to assist them paying for the breast cancer screening despite that the program aims to offer the low cost of cancers screening.

Although, the EWM program aims to enhance preventive disease among women to avert serious health problem, nevertheless, women health conditions could only be treated if the disease are detected earlier enough. The costs of screening the breast cancer have prevented many low income women from carrying out the screening until the disease have been developed in the woman body. In the United States, people who lack the health insurance face the risks of developing chronic disease because they will not be able to afford a regular medical checkup.

"Health insurance status is a critical factor in determining access to care and health outcomes for women with breast cancer. Women without health insurance are less likely to receive mammogram screening services compared to those who are insured." (Vann, & Julie, 2011 p 97).

While the EWM attempted to bridge the gap by taking preventive health measures for low income women, nevertheless, the program is unable to meet its goals since it records no objective feedback from the program's support staff. Without feedback from the program support staff, it will be challenging to identify the problems associated with its implementation, and address the shortcomings. Backer, Geske, McIlvain et al. (2005) point out that many physicians in the rural hospitals were less enthusiastic about the program and without the support of physicians for a health promotion program, a program may not effectively improved.

Lack of financial and human resources for its implementation is another problem that hinders an effective implementation of the EMW. (Shi, & Singh, 2010). Typically, an effective implementation of a program requires an integration of human and financial resources. The EMW fails to raise adequate human and financial resources for the implementation since it focuses only on low-income women. Additionally, the program stakeholders were unable to raise adequate funding from the state and federal authorities. Thus, the inadequate resources associated with the program leads to logistic complications during the program's implementation. More importantly, the EMW lacks sufficient flexibility to deal with numerous changes associated to the program. Ineffective leaderships styles have also been associated to the program's failures.

Strategies to implement more Effective Prevention Program

The stakeholders of Every Woman Matter should design a strategy to collect the feedback of people regarding the program since the outcome of the feedbacks will assist in addressing the shortcomings associated to the program. Moreover, the Every Woman Matter needs to make the flow of communication to be very effective. The integration of new technological platform will assist in enhancing a flow of communication. Backer, Geske, McIlvain et al. (2005) argues that "the GAPS model can be used to develop a practice-based intervention to identify and reduce barriers to delivery of breast and cervical cancer screening services." (p 401). The GAPS model can assist the Every Woman Matter to enhance preventive care and achieve goalsetting.

The program stakeholders need to recruit more staff to promote efficiency of the program. There is a need to carry out a systematic review to change its complex practice and call for more effective strategy to assist in enhancing a sustainable changes of the program. Changing the practice behavior requires teamwork among staff and clinicians required willingness and flexibility to change, which is based on the individual interventions. The program also needs to seek for additional financial resources from both federal and state governments.

Conclusion

Every Woman Matter aims to assist low income women for cancer's screening. Nevertheless, the program was unsuccessful because it is short of both financial and human resources. The paper identifies two successful cancer programs and discusses the features that make the programs to be successful. The paper suggests that Every Woman Matter needs to seek for more financial and human resources to make the program to be more successful.

Reference

Backer, E.L. Geske, J.A. McIlvain, H. E. et al. (2005). Improving Female Preventive Health Care Delivery Through Practice Change: An Every Woman Matters Study. J Am Board Fam Med. 18( 5): 401-408.

Lardiere, K.(2014). New Jersey Cancer Education and Early Detection Program (NJ CEED). Ocean County Health Department.

Shi, L. & Singh, D. A. (2010). Essentials of the U.S. health care system, Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Vann, J. & Julie, C. (2011). Slipping through the cracks of the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act -- A Tragic Case of Failed Access to Care, Journal of Nursing Law, 14(3):96-101.