Lessons Learned While Developing "Clinical Trials Education for Native Americans" Curriculum

This paper highlights lessons learned while developing the Clinical Trials Education for Native Americans (CTENA) curriculum. The CTENA is a culturally specific clinical trials education curriculum that evolved from another ongoing NCI-supported project, Clinical Trials Education for Colorado Providers. The multicultural team learned many lessons while developing, pretesting, and revising this curriculum. These include allocating sufficient time and resources to tailor presentations for diverse tribal settings and workshop participants, addressing barriers to participation in clinical trials through culturally appropriate strategies, providing information to foster informed decision making related to participation, and writing as a team to increase cultural breadth of examples and interactive experiences. There are multiple challenges to developing and implementing a culturally acceptable curriculum on clinical trials within medically underserved communities. Both the multicultural team and the curriculum benefited from the collaborative process, resulting in a culturally relevant clinical trials curriculum that will assist Native Americans to make informed choices about clinical trials participation. The lessons shared here, which may need to be modified to be culturally relevant to other underrepresented communities, may be beneficial to others developing similar curricula for other medically underserved populations.