Tips for Patient Recruitment

Inreach Patient Recruitment

Inreach is commonly defined as active promotion of a service to clients already accessing the healthcare system. Inreach focuses on providers and health care organizations to enable cancer screening to be institutionalized. Activities may include:

• Educate clinic staff about screening guidelines and about Every Woman’s Life. All clinic staff can help by making a concerted effort to promote screening to patients “every step of the way.”
• Display Every Woman’s Life flyers, brochures, and posters prominently in clinic waiting rooms, exam rooms and other places.
• Add mammography to the preventative care flow sheet in clinic patient charts. Staff should check the flow sheets for periodic health maintenance, and flag the chart to alert clinicians that screening is due and the patient may be eligible for Every Woman’s Life.
• Include an Every Woman’s Life flyer with clinic billings, flu clinic notices, holiday greetings or other mailings.
• Send personal invitations or “birthday cards” to age-appropriate female patients with their own physician’s signature encouraging them to come in for screening.
• Set up a system to remind patients when they are due to return for their annual screening exam.

Outreach Patient Recruitment

Outreach focuses on intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community-level factors to reach women in their community, where they feel comfortable.

• Places of worship
• Work with service and women’s groups. Make a presentation and provide flyers to distribute to other women and families. Place a flyer or article in the church bulletin to promote cancer screening and Every Woman’s Life.
• Hold special screening event at church.
• Hold a health fair at a community church where there is a high population of potentially eligible women and include literature about Every Woman’s Life.

• Businesses
• Arrange to have flyers available and distributed by local businesses such as beauty salons, grocery stores, clothing retailers, etc.
• Arrange to put stuffers about the program in employee pay checks.

• Pharmacies
• Arrange to include program flyers in all prescription orders.
• Put up a breast cancer awareness display in an appropriate are of the store.
• Ask pharmacy to place a program advertisement in their weekly circular.

• Social Service and Cultural Organizations
• Arrange to display program information during food distribution days.
• Partner with other community groups during special events to display Every Woman’s Life materials.
• Send letters and flyers to local social service agencies so that they may refer eligible patients to clinics with Every Woman’s Life Services.