Community-Based Cervical Cancer Prevention and Education Among Women Living With HIV

The long-term goal is to build a sustainable, community-based outreach program to promote
cervical cancer screening among women living with HIV (WLH), thereby reducing related
morbidity and mortality. The strategy for achieving this goal is to develop an intervention
incorporating health literacy approaches and principles of community-based participatory
research. Health literacy is a relatively new concept that has been applied mainly toward
identifying high-risk individuals rather than toward changing health behaviors and outcomes.
The proposed intervention is the first to integrate health literacy into educating WLH to
promote cervical cancer screening. Community Health Workers (CHW) support has also rarely
been incorporated into cancer screening interventions targeting WLH, making the proposed
intervention a uniquely comprehensive approach. Building on recent successful testing by the
investigators of a health literacy-focused intervention to promote cervical cancer screening
in recent immigrant women, the investigators will test whether health literacy-focused
interventions delivered by trained CHWs will be effective in promoting health literacy and
increasing Pap test rates in a new population, WLH. The investigators hypothesize that,
compared to WLH in the control group, WLH who receive the health literacy-focused CHW
intervention will demonstrate: (1) higher rates of Pap test, (2) greater levels of health
literacy, (3) higher levels of cervical cancer knowledge, and (4) higher self-efficacy.