Limited research has been done on the experiences of cervical cancer survivors in specific locales, however, such as in the city of Chicago. Studying cervical cancer survivorship experiences in Chicago may be especially important as cervical cancer in Chicago occurs 39% more often and has a 60 percent higher mortality rate than the national average (Equal Hope 2023). There have also been significant racial disparities in cervical cancer mortality documented in Chicago, with Latina and African American women being almost three times more likely to die from the illness than white women in Chicago (Equal Hope 2019). These disparities bring even more urgency to the question of what gaps in needs women experience post cervical cancer diagnosis and treatment; these needs must be understood in order to attempt to start bridging these gaps in not only outcomes but experiences of women living with this serious illness.

Our project aims to understand the needs of the patients with cervical cancer who seek care at the UChicago hospitals. We hope to elucidate their socioeconomic unmet needs in survivorship to in the long term navigate them to the appropriate resources to meet those needs via organizations such as Equal Hope and address preventable difficulties in the cervical cancer experience. The domains of needs we hope to investigate include and extend beyond patients medical needs and access to care, financial needs, food insecurity, and other socioeconomic needs.

We have designed a semi structured interview questionnaire based on the social ecological model, which is a theory-based framework that posits five hierarchical levels (intrapersonal, interpersonal, community, organizational, and policy/enabling environment) which determine behaviors and can be leveraged for health promotion (Scarneo et al 2019). We plan to compile a list of cervical cancer patients treated at UChicago hospitals. Study lists will be reviewed by treating physicians to confirm that patient is appropriate to approach. With physician permission, we will contact patients through phone via EMR contacts and recruit for semi-structured interviews.We also plan to recruit nurses and social workers employed at UChicago Medicine in order to gain their perspectives on the most pressing patient needs after cervical cancer diagnosis. We plan to conduct a maximum of 20 interviews with women receiving cancer care in Chicago. In addition, we plan to interview up to 15 key stakeholders (i.e. physicians, nurses, social workers or other healthcare providers) for their perspectives on patient needs. After interviews are completed, we plan on transcribing interviews via the Otter.ai application and my own manual transcription. We then plan on qualitative thematic analysis on the interview transcripts to identify major needs of the patient population using ATLAS.ti.

Microsoft Excel

ATLAS.ti

Epic