The National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC) has been approved for a funding award through the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award Program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). The funds will support a new NBCC project to facilitate lasting, meaningful collaboration between trained breast cancer advocates and academic researchers to integrate patient perspectives into future comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER).
NBCC’s Chief Programs Officer Dr. Michelle Tregear will lead the engagement project. With input from a committee of advocates and researchers, NBCC will develop training, practical toolkits, and a structured mentorship framework to prepare stakeholders to successfully work together. Building the skills, shared understanding, and support needed to initiate and sustain these equitable collaborations will help ensure that breast cancer research truly reflects patients’ needs.
“NBCC has spent decades preparing advocates to engage in science. Now we’re building the next step—giving trained advocates the skills and support to develop and sustain research partnerships while also helping researchers build the capacity to engage patient advocates in meaningful and equitable ways,” said Tregear. “Our goal is to prepare both advocates and researchers to work together as partners throughout the comparative clinical effectiveness research process. Stronger partnerships will lead to breast cancer research that is more relevant to the people it is intended to serve.”
Information about the project and how researchers and advocates can get involved will be published on NBCC’s website, stopbreastcancer.org.
This project is part of a portfolio funded by PCORI to help develop a community of patients, caregivers, clinicians, and other stakeholders who are better equipped to engage as partners in all phases of patient-centered CER and to disseminate results of PCORI-funded studies. Through its Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities, and organizations who can leverage their lived experience to influence research to be more patient-centered, relevant and useful.
PCORI is a nonprofit organization with a mission to fund patient-centered CER designed to provide patients and those who care for them with evidence to make better-informed health care decisions.
About the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC): NBCC’s mission is to end breast cancer. We are a collaboration of activists, survivors, grassroots groups, and other stakeholders who have come together as disruptive innovators for social change. We link hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals from across the country into a dynamic, diverse coalition giving breast cancer a meaningful voice in Washington, DC, and state capitals; in laboratories and health care institutions; and in local communities everywhere. To learn more and join the movement, visit stopbreastcancer.org.
