Dr Diane Mahoney on Tackling Ovarian Cancer Care Disparities

In part 2 of our interview with Diane Mahoney, PhD, DNP, FNP-BC, WHNP-BC, APRN, assistant professor, University of Kansas Medical Center, School of Nursing; nurse practitioner; and nurse scientist, she advocates for a multidisciplinary, community-centered approach to reduce ovarian cancer care disparities discovered in her recent study, "Elucidating the Influences of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) on Perceived Overall Health Among African American/Black and Hispanic Ovarian Cancer Survivors Using the NIH All of Us Research Program."

Mahoney also discusses social, biological, and environmental factors that can be further explored to better understand health disparities in ovarian cancer survivors.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

How can health care professionals use your findings to address and reduce ovarian cancer care disparities?

I think we can no longer live in silos. How I mean that is it can't be health care professionals carrying the torch of doing everything. It can't be policies alone and researchers alone. I think we need to bring in the community, we need to bring in survivors, I think it has to be multidisciplinary, but it needs to be centered around the patient, it needs to be centered around the community.

The key thing, I think, is prevention, prevention, prevention. Because if we can come together to prevent the disease in the first place, if there's these factors that we could collaboratively work together on, I think that could really revolutionize things and it can change how we look at these approaches.

So, again, unity, as a team, and it's one thing to say it, but it's another thing to do it. That's my goal, and that's the research that I propose to do is to do it very collaboratively but have the individuals, the women, at the center of everything. Let's work around that focus to drive how we can make changes for the future.

Are there any additional SDOH factors that should be explored to gain a more comprehensive understanding of health disparities in ovarian cancer survivors?

That's a great question because I can't say that I captured them all. We do statistics, and we do these studies, and we look at these things, and then you go, oh my gosh. Even when we controlled for some of these variables, so we held them all equal among all women and say, "Okay, everything's equal." Is there still a problem? Is there still a perception of overall health being less among these differing underrepresented populations? It's still there.

So, your question is, are there residual effects? Absolutely. So, how do we capture them? I think we continue to develop the literature, we continue to talk to the women to see what it is. I think, sometimes, we look at data, and that's important, but I think we need to talk to individuals. I think if we do community groups, if we begin to ask them, what are their perceptions? What do you think? How do you perceive this is happening? I think we can begin to capture those.

We can't always capture them in a questionnaire unless we ask the women first, what are the driving factors? And then we can begin to measure those, but, absolutely, there are certainly residual effects of social determinants of health that we don't know yet. But I think that's how we bring in biological.

My research interest is social determinants, but there's also environmental and biological, biological meaning how those exposures influence different measures in your body that can be measured with blood, that can be measured with different samples, and sort of looking at those types of things. So, we have to look at the whole picture, not only the social determinants, the biological determinants, and the environmental. I think then we can grasp a better picture of how we move forward.

Reference

McCormick B. SDOH Factors Impact Health Perceptions in Black, Hispanic Ovarian Cancer Survivors. AJMC. Published July 17, 2024. Accessed July 22, 2024. https://www.ajmc.com/view/sdoh-factors-impact-health-perceptions-in-black-hispanic-ovarian-cancer-survivors