Cedars-Sinai spearheads first national certification program for COE staff at cancer centers
The NCI Cancer Center Support Grant requires community outreach and engagement, but the design and implementation of COE programs, as well as staff training, are largely left to individual institutions.
Namoonga Mantina gives a tour of the University of Arizona Cancer Center’s inflatable colon at a workplace health fair for Abbott Laboratories employees in Casa Grande, AZ.
Courtesy of Namoonga Mantina
A group of cancer centers—spearheaded by Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center, an institution vying for NCI designation—has co-developed the first national training and certification program for cancer-related COE.
“Our main goal is to contribute towards building the capacity of the COE workforce through this engaging training. And this really equips COE outreach staff with the knowledge and skills to become proficient cancer control professionals,” Zul Surani, the Cedars-Sinai director for the program and associate director of community outreach and engagement for the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center and the Cancer Research Center for Health Equity, said to The Cancer Letter.
The 10-week online Certificate in COE program provides a foundation for early-career staff. The program, managed by the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Research Training and Education Coordination Office, has certified 90 participants representing 42 NCI-designated and emerging cancer centers so far.
Ten people took part in the pilot program in summer 2023, and the inaugural cohort this past spring included 55 people. The second cohort, which completed the program on Nov. 22, had 25 participants.
Recruiting has already begun for the spring and fall 2025 cohorts, which will be limited to 25 people each.
Surani said he benefited from a similar training program earlier in his career. He took part in the now-ended NCI Cancer Information Service Partnership Program, as did many of the individuals from other institutions who helped develop the Certificate in COE program.
“We were all trained on, essentially, all these different components that are really critical in doing cancer-related community outreach and engagement, because this is so specialized. And those of us who participated in that program many, many years ago remained in touch and saw each other at national conferences, even after it ended,” Surani said. “We all came together, really, to co-create this Certificate in COE program. So, it has a foundation of success from this old program.”
Surani and colleagues realized the need for a national COE training program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many staff were leaving COE for new career areas, Surani said. “Because of the lack of standardized training, we wanted to come together to think about developing something like this.”
Surani brought together advisors from several institutions to create the Certificate in COE program. Collaborators currently include:
Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center,
Fox Chase Cancer Center,
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center,
Stanford Cancer Institute,
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences,
University of California-Irvine Health Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center,
University of Kansas Cancer Center,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
West Virginia University Cancer Institute.
“This program is really laying the groundwork and the foundation of what they can build upon through the work that they’ll be doing through their COE center, as well as their own professional development,” said Mary Ellen Conn, director of community outreach and engagement in the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control at WVU Cancer Institute.
The program focuses on one topic per week, based on the co-developers’ areas of expertise. For instance, Conn and her colleague Amy Allen created a module about comprehensive cancer control and working with state coalitions.
“The module presents both the broad perspective, as well as encourages the individual to think specifically about their state or catchment area where they have potential partnerships,” said Allen, director of research integration in the Department of Cancer Prevention and Control at WVU Cancer Institute. “The goal of the module is really to exemplify how partnering with comprehensive cancer control coalitions can serve as a convener to bring people together to address specific issues, but also to help COE programs facilitate relationships in areas where they may not have an existing path.”
Instruction each week includes about one hour of recorded lectures for participants to watch on their own time, and a one-hour virtual discussion for participants and facilitators to talk about how to apply that week’s materials.
These live discussion sessions garner perspectives from a wide range of COE staff, said Karin Denes-Collar, psychosocial services director at the Masonic Cancer Alliance of the University of Kansas Cancer Center. Denes-Collar was part of the second cohort.
“I’m in Kansas, but when you look at the folks in my cohort, we are gathered from all across the country. So, I really appreciate the diversity—diversity of our faculty as well—with different experiences and different knowledge bases,” Denes-Collar said.
“I’m learning from other people about what they’re doing in their catchment area that is frequently very different from ours,” she said. “They may have a really different population; they’re doing different programs. But then, I’ve had the opportunity to think about, ‘How do we translate that?’”
Denes-Collar has been applying what she learned. She easily found data from trustworthy sources for a presentation thanks to knowledge gained during the course. “It felt like a much more fluid process for me than it might have prior to taking the class,” Denes-Collar said.
Namoonga Mantina, who was a member of the inaugural cohort earlier this year, said the certificate program helped fill in some of her knowledge gaps. Coming into COE from a public health background, she knew relatively little about the processes that take place after a person receives a cancer diagnosis.
“I’m not actively involved on the clinical side, but a lot of the questions that we get asked from our community members are, ‘What happens beyond the lobby of the hospital?” said Mantina, community outreach manager at the University of Arizona Cancer Center’s Office of COE and a doctoral candidate at the UA Zuckerman College of Public Health.
She has also taken inspiration from data visualizations displayed by her cohort mates’ cancer centers to come up with more effective ways to show data from her own institution’s catchment area.
Both Denes-Collar and Mantina encourage all early-career cancer center COE staff to participate in the certificate program.
“Something like the COE certificate program helps you bridge and see the ties across why we do what we do,” Mantina said. “I think my team has an understanding that their work isn’t in a silo, but something like the certificate program helps reinforce that the work that we’re doing builds upon the work of others.”
