Abstract
Molecular human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA is a recommended test for any country planning
cervical cancer screening as a national policy. The emerging literature proposes HPV
self-sampling (HPV-SS) as a feasible implementing strategy in low-income settings.
The success of this strategy would depend on developing impactful health education
materials, understanding modalities toward generating awareness, and precision in
performing the screening test among beneficiaries. The current paper is an interim
analysis of ongoing research undertaken to understand the acceptability of HPV-SS
among Indian women across different community settings. The study design has two modalities
for generating awareness: (1) health education arm wherein the awareness and steps
of collecting self-sample are explained by health personnel, and (2) the pamphlet
arm wherein pictorial illustrations depicting the steps to conduct HPV-SS are distributed
among women. The quality of samples is compared with primary health worker samples
(PHW-S). Initial results of this study support the acceptance of HPV-SS (97%) among
urban slum settings. An agreement between HPV-SS and PHW-S was demonstrated to be
95.1%. The results of the pamphlet arm were comparable to the health education arm
in every aspect. The art-based strategy seems like a promising communication modality
for generating awareness toward cervical cancer screening using HPV-SS in low-resource
settings.
Keywords
cervical cancer screening - HPV test - HPV self-sampling - art-based strategy - low-resource
settings
