Community Programs

Outreach

Center for Asian Health (CAH) uses a variety of culturally and linguistically appropriate strategies to reach and provide a wide range of services to underserved and medically under-insured Asian American communities that include health education, health screenings, and navigation for those community members diagnosed health problems that require medical attention. CAH staff and its partners participate in health fairs, community health events, as well as city-, state- and federally-supported health screenings and prevention programs such as mammography. CAH has demonstrated experiences in delivering health messages using multiple media approaches and in engagement of community leaders and health professionals in its overall goal of narrowing or eliminating health disparities in Asian Americans. Over the past 16 years, using these strategies and channels, CAH has reached 246,412 Asian American community members and distributed 213,844 cancer and tobacco related educational materials to Asian communities

Health Education

CAH is a national Center located in the Mid-Atlantic region that is home to many Asian communities whose primary language is not English. The Center offers both a cultural and linguistic bridge for these communities to overcome barriers that impede the flow of and acquisition of important information such as health information. Although CAH’s mission in Asian community health is broad, the Center’s ultimate goal has been the reduction or elimination of health disparities. CAH’s current Community Health Education Programs focus on a broad range of health problems among Asian Americans including breast cancer, cervical cancer, colorectal cancer, hep-B-liver cancer, and cancers associated with smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and mental health issues.   

Assessment of community needs has, however, given impetus to health education and prevention programs in hypertension and osteoporosis control. The primary aim of these programs, in addition to increase knowledge, is to improve community access to and utilization of state-of-the-art screening and intervention strategies for these diseases. To that end, CAH provides multi-level modalities, such as bilingual community health educator-led interactive education workshops, patient navigation, bilingual physician engagement and individual motivational interviewing/counseling. In collaboration with community and healthcare provider partners, CAH has educated 22,731 Asian community members on various cancer, tobacco and chronic disease topics through 1,114 in-person community education workshops.

Patient navigation

Significant barriers are a major cause of low cancer screening rates and follow up on abnormal results among medically underserved Asian Americans. In response to this critical community need, CAH developed and implemented a patient navigation assistance program that helps undeserved and uninsured patients access to a spectrum of cancer care process and procedures from cancer prevention, screening, abnormality follow up diagnosis tests and treatment. The patient navigation assistance program has been beneficial to patients with suspicious findings accessing into the healthcare system and overcoming barriers to get timely care.

To date, CAH has organized and conducted 299 cancer screening events with clinical partners and assisted over 9895 received free cancer screening or HBV screening, whom 549 with abnormal screening results received navigation assistance for follow up healthcare.