Prevent and Reduce Adverse Health Effects of Pesticides on Indigenous Farmworkers is a community- based participatory research project addressing the significant risk of pesticide exposure among farmworkers and the need for culturally and linguistically appropriate training to decrease their risk of exposure. We will examine the effectiveness of a community-engagement, network-building intervention to implement an effective occupational safety and health program. This phase of work will begin examining the factors that influence the adoption and sustainability of the program by organizations and individuals that serve or are the target population of farmworkers speaking indigenous languages.
The specific aims that will guide every phase of the project are to: 1) Identify support networks or other partners at the local or regional level that can facilitate dissemination of the intervention; 2) Determine the perspectives and needs of user organizations who disseminate the training program (promotores, video, sociodramas from the tool box of trainings) to indigenous farmworkers including; 3) Using an expanded user and support network, determine the reach of the program, assess the effectiveness, and describe how the intervention is modified by user organizations, and 4) Create a sustainable leadership model for indigenous community members to effect adoption and implementation of the intervention training. The main elements of the design framework are based on the Health Promotion Research Center Dissemination Framework developed by the University of Washington Prevention Center, which focuses on a close partnership between researchers and a dissemination organization that takes ownership of the dissemination process, and the use of social marketing principles to work closely with potential users who will adopt the educational program. The RE-AIM evaluation framework emphasizes the reach to and representativeness of individual participants and organization settings. Towards that end, we will evaluate changes at multiple levels, including changes among individual farmworkers (participants), participating organizations, and in policy attributable to the dissemination and implementation of our intervention training curriculum.
Prior work by this partnership demonstrated evidence of a positive effect of training on pesticide knowledge scores and reduced DNA damage. This is relevant to public health because damage to DNA is believed to be a precursor of health conditions such as cancer and neurological disease associated with pesticide exposure.
| Farquhar, Stephanie; de Jesus Gonzalez, Carmen; Hall, Jennifer et al. (2014) Recruiting and retaining indigenous farmworker participants. J Immigr Minor Health 16:1011-5 |
| McCauley, Linda; Runkle, Jennifer D; Samples, Julie et al. (2013) Oregon indigenous farmworkers: results of promotor intervention on pesticide knowledge and organophosphate metabolite levels. J Occup Environ Med 55:1164-70 |
