First Phase of $6 Million NIH Grant Poised to Help UW-CTRI Reach Salvation Army Participants

Dr. Danielle McCarthy describes a new grant designed to help people at community service organizations to address their tobacco use.

Dr. Danielle McCarthy
Dr. Danielle McCarthy

UW-CTRI will partner with the Salvation Army of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan on a new $6 million grant to evaluate sustainable strategies Salvation Army staff can use to connect their adult participants who use tobacco with the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line for free tobacco treatment.

UW-CTRI Research Director Dr. Danielle McCarthy will serve as the principal investigator. Dr. Russ Glasgow at the University of Colorado-Denver and Dr. Borsika Rabin at the University of California San Diego will provide implementation science expertise for this pragmatic research project. The grant received a near-perfect score from the National Institutes of Health.

This unique project will be funded by a cooperative agreement with the National Cancer Institute and will begin with a two-year, $1.5 million pilot phase to refine study methods and ensure that the team can hit key milestones and benchmarks. If this pilot phase is successful, a four-year randomized trial of the implementation strategies refined at two pilot sites will be rolled out in 16 additional Salvation Army service centers in Wisconsin.

“This is an impressive score and a meaningful new project,” said new UW-CTRI Director Dr. Hasmeena Kathuria. “It’s indicative of the wonderful work Danielle, her co-investigators and the research team have been doing on so many current studies and proposed grants.”

Community agencies like the Salvation Army are well suited for this project because they help people with socioeconomic disadvantages. They can connect participants to evidence-based treatment to help them address their smoking.

This study will evaluate ways to prepare and encourage Salvation Army staff to invite Salvation Army participants into a conversation about their tobacco use. If the participant is interested, Salvation Army staff members will offer the participant the opportunity to learn more about smoking and smoking treatment, and to think through the pros and cons of quitting or continuing smoking. Staff members will then help connect interested participants with the Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line for free coaching and medication.

ZIP Code Project Staff
UW-CTRI partnered with the Salvation Army to hire Milwaukee residents to reach out to their neighbors in communities targeted by Big Tobacco.

Wisconsin Salvation Army social service leaders, staff, and participants will play leading roles in planning, monitoring, and adapting Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line connection implementation strategies so they fit well in the usual context of Salvation Army services. Specifically, they will adapt two promising strategies supported by preliminary research.

One promising strategy that will be evaluated in this project is an enhanced model of support for Salvation Army implementation teams. This will be compared against the usual UW-CTRI regional outreach support model in different Salvation Army service centers.

The second strategy to be tested is focused on giving participants an incentive to talk with a Wisconsin Tobacco Quit Line coach before they leave the Salvation Army. Salvation Army staff will develop an incentive strategy that they can sustain long-term, such as extra food pantry access, to promote participant connections with Quit Line treatment. These incentives are designed to give participants who want to quit using tobacco someday a reason to act on that desire today, and to give staff more confidence that they can interest participants in talking with the Quit Line.

“The study leverages a unique and productive partnership to experimentally evaluate potentially scalable implementation strategies,” McCarthy said, “to address a potent health threat to these participants—tobacco use.”

Researchers will gather data on Quit Line referrals from Salvation Army service records and quitline records in the course of usual care. This will be supplemented by mixed-method assessments of Salvation Army participants and staff conducted by researchers.

“This pragmatic program of research has the potential to identify staff- and participant-focused strategies that can enhance Salvation Army efforts to support tobacco cessation among their participants,” McCarthy said. “Leaders at the Salvation Army are committed to helping their participants quit tobacco, and to applying the lessons learned in the proposed project more broadly in the region and nation.”

Study co-investigators include UW Researchers Dr. Daniel Bolt, Dr. Marlon Mundt, Dr. Wendy Slutske, Dr. Tim Baker and Dr. Adrienne Johnson. The official study title is, Using a Pragmatic Randomized Rollout Trial to Evaluate Implementation Strategies to Promote Smoking Treatment and Cancer Prevention for Salvation Army Clients.