Effectiveness of Community Health Worker-Led Interventions in Enhancing Colorectal Cancer Screening Uptake in Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.

Background: The colorectal cancer (CRC) screening uptake rate is substantially lower in ethnic minority populations than in the general population. Racial and ethnic minority individuals experience more barriers in obtaining a screening test for CRC when compared with the non-Hispanic White population.

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of community health worker-led interventions in improving the CRC screening uptake rate in racial and ethnic minority populations.

Methods: Five databases, EMBASE, CINAHL, MEDLINE, Scopus, and PubMed, were systematically searched, and reference lists of the identified articles were manually searched for relevant articles in May 2022. Only randomized controlled trials were included.

Results: A total of 10 randomized controlled trials conducted in the United States were included in this review. The findings of the meta-analysis showed that CRC screening uptake was enhanced in participants receiving community health worker-led interventions compared with those receiving no intervention (odds ratio, 2.25; 95% confidence interval, 1.48-3.44; P < .001). The subgroup analysis by diverse racial and ethnic groups and number of components (single vs multiple) of the community health worker-led interventions showed that multicomponent interventions were more effective in increasing the CRC uptake rate among all racial and ethnic groups regardless of their background.

Conclusions: Multicomponent community health worker-led interventions can improve CRC screening uptake in racial and ethnic minority populations.

Implications for practice: The findings of the present review show that multicomponent community health worker-led interventions are shown to be effective to improve the CRC screening uptake targeting other racial and ethnic minority groups in other countries.