Movember proudly announces its latest prostate cancer investment of over $5.5 million. Over three years, eighteen grants (16 proposals and 2 community development grants) will directly address inequities in prostate cancer care. The grants are spread across five countries: six in Canada, five in the United Kingdom, three in Australia, three in the United States, and one in Ireland. Each has a specific focus population and care area.
Income, education, geographical location, and discrimination based on ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation, are only a fraction of factors that can negatively affect a person’s quality of cancer care. This is defined as the “equity gap” and it’s costing people their lives.
“We’re living in a time of amazing advancements in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and care. Though, the reality is that who you are and where you live dictates the quality of care you receive,” says Kris Bennett, Director of Prostate Cancer Health Equity at Movember. “To address these inequities, head on, each grant funded by Movember will target one or more key populations that are culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD), rural and remote, LGBTQIA+, First Nations and Indigenous, Black and Caribbean men or people of low socio-economic status.”
Targeted outreach programs will help provide education and empower historically and intentionally excluded communities, using community stakeholders and voices to build trust. Collaborations with healthcare providers, academic institutions, and community-based organizations will share resources and expertise to develop tailored solutions.
“The community partnerships are a key component to enable these projects to identify important gaps in cancer outcomes and to inform meaningful interventions and strategies that improve equity,” says Sarah Weller, Global Director of Prostate Cancer at Movember. “These comprehensive efforts will aim to ensure that all people with a prostate have access to essential information, support, and treatment.”
To ensure the grant recipients reflected the unique needs and priorities of local communities, review panels were held in each participating country (Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom). These panels brought together diverse perspectives, including those of Movember community members with lived experience, health equity advocates, and subject matter experts.
Movember recognizes that centering the voices of those closest to the challenges being addressed is essential to advancing health equity. Community voices provide invaluable insights into the barriers, opportunities, and unmet needs within their populations—insights that are often overlooked without intentional engagement. This approach not only strengthens the impact of our funding but also ensures our initiatives align with the lived realities and priorities of the communities we serve.
Australia Funding Details
Australia will see $800,000 invested in three successful grant proposals. One grant recipient is the Royal Flying Doctors Service (RDFS) of Australia whose grant will focus on Australia’s rural and remote populations; addressing the inequity of access and use of prostate cancer treatment services by identifying critical gaps in existing population-level data. Studies show that men in major cities are 13% more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer compared with men in remote areas. However, the mortality rate for men in remote areas is almost 20% higher than that of men in major cities1. The equity gap is clear.
By conducting social media mining, online surveys, and qualitative interviews, RDFS aims to identify factors underlying these disparities by exploring the lived experiences of men diagnosed with prostate cancer and their families. This work will inform the future development of evidence-based interventions to improve the health andwell-beingg of men living with prostate cancer in rural or remote areas.
The George Institute for Global Health is another successful recipient whose funding will have a localized reach aiding Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) prostate cancer patients of South-Western Sydney to attain equitable access to care and optimal health, social, al and economic outcomes.
Whilst it is recognized that patients with CALD backgrounds face barriers to accessing healthcare and often experience worse health outcomes, current evidence on CALD populations specifically in the setting of prostate cancer is insufficient to act on: we can’t improve what we can’t measure.
Currently, CALD populations are poorly represented in clinical trials and cohort studies, and ethnicity, language,e, and migration data are not comprehensively collected in Australia’s health and administrative datasets. Without this evidence, inequities can’t be accurately understood in outcomes and the gaps in access to care that CALD prostate cancer patients experience.
Using both a novel data linkage of national and state-based datasets (including Census and migration data), paired with a unique, local health district-based data platform they will study the experiences of CALD prostate cancer patients more accurately and comprehensively. These experiences will include their diagnostic pathways, cancer presentations, access to health care (including cancer treatment and psychosocial care), survival, morbidity, and social and financial outcomes. This research will be guided by a panel of consumers from CALD backgrounds with lived experience of prostate cancer.
The third and final grant recipient is the Australian Prostate Centre (APC) whose project is focused on strengthening health literacy and help-seeking through culturally appropriate mechanisms and practices within the LGBTQIA+ community. The LGBTQIA+ community faces unique challenges in getting prostate cancer screenings and diagnoses, including fear of discrimination and stigma. As a result, screening rates are estimated to be 40% lower in this community.
This project aims to understand these challenges through discussions with the community, to design a service specifically for prostate cancer screening in the LGBTQIA+ community, guided by input from people within this community at all stages of development. This should lead to increased screenings, earlier diagnoses, positive long-term outcomes, and improved quality of life for these patients. APC will also drive system-level change, through the creation of a guideline on how to effectively roll out similar programs for other healthcare organizations.
To learn more about Movember’s work in the prostate cancer space visit here.
About Movember
Twenty-one years ago, a bristly idea was born in Melbourne Australia, igniting a movement that would transcend borders and change the face of men’s health forever. The movement, known as Movember, united people from all walks of life – sparking billions of important conversations, raising vital funds, and shattering the silence surrounding men’s health issues.
Movember is committed to advancing new research, cutting-edge treatments, and healthy behaviors, and advocating for inclusive, gender-responsive healthcare that caters to the unique needs of men, women, and gender-diverse individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. In doing so, they hope to forge a future where barriers to healthy living are overcome, stigmas are removed, and where everyone has an equal opportunity to live a long, healthy life. By improving men’s health, we can have a profoundly positive impact on women,
families, and society.
For further information or media inquiries please visit www.movember.com or contact Caitlyn McMahon, PR Manager at Movember Australia at [email protected].
References
1 AIHW Cancer in Australia 2021 Table S10.5 Prostate cancer incidence 2012-2016, Prostate cancer mortality 2015 – 2019
