Abstract

Background
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in the UK and Black African-Caribbean men are twice as likely to develop prostate cancer as white men. These cancer inequalities need urgent tackling. Barriers to early diagnosis are complex and require complex solutions. Culturally-tailored, community-centred and participatory approaches show promise in tackling cancer inequalities. We aim to co-design a culturally appropriate intervention to tackle barriers to early diagnosis of prostate cancer for Black men in Scotland and the North-East of England using a community-centred participatory approach.

Methods
The PROCAN-B study is a mixed methods study set in Scotland and the North-East of England. A Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE) group (n=12), is involved at every step of the research. Drawing on principles of the Integrated Screening Action model (I-SAM), the study has 8 objectives: 1) to explore barriers to early diagnosis of prostate cancer among Black men (45+) through focus groups (n=12); 2) to co-design a culturally acceptable peer-led intervention to tackle barriers to early diagnosis of prostate cancer in Black men; 3) to train members of the community as ‘peer-facilitators’ (n=8); 4) to deliver the intervention in each location, facilitated by peer-facilitators, with a purposive sample (n=20) of Black men (45+); 5) to qualitatively evaluate the intervention through focus groups; 6) to refine the intervention based on qualitative feedback; 7) to pilot the refined intervention with another purposive sample (n=40) through a cross-sectional survey pre- and post-intervention; 8) to qualitatively evaluate the refined intervention through focus groups to further refine the intervention.