Grant To Pay For Cancer Tests Funding Emphasizes Outreach To Minority And Rural Women
Forty-seven thousand women in Washington lack either sufficient money or insurance to get breast cancer and cervical cancer checkups.
This in a state where breast cancer outranks all other cancer killers, taking nearly 800 lives in 1997 alone.
Washington’s Department of Health hopes to reverse those dismal statistics with a $15 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The grant was announced Wednesday in Spokane.
The money will come in $3 million increments each of the next five years. It will be matched with $1 million a year in state funds.
The money means free cancer testing for 9,500 women a year across the state, 700 of them in Eastern Washington, said Maxine Hayes, acting state health officer.
“We will use this to identify, reach and screen people not otherwise able to get into the system,” Hayes said at a news conference. “The mammogram and Pap test are standard tests to which every woman should have access.”
The program has a special emphasis on reaching minority women. While they are less likely to contract breast cancer than white women, African Americans are far more likely to die of the disease, health officials said. The rate of cervical cancer is twice as high among Asian women in Washington than it is for whites.
Rural women without the financial means to get checkups also are a special part of the outreach. Because of isolation and the lack of healthcare providers, they are among those least likely to get the exams.
This is the second time in six years the federal government has provided funds to make the screening available to women between the ages of 40 and 65. This time, however, the state Health Department is having different health-care operations across the state arrange for the screening in their area instead of arranging that from Olympia.
Localizing the effort reduces the bureaucratic burdens and uses local providers with local knowledge to get more women into the program, Hayes said.
The Spokane County Regional Health District will be responsible for 10 counties in the eastern part of the state, from Ferry and Stevens on the north, to Asotin, Columbia and Garfield on the south. Its outreach will include working with the new self-contained mammography bus recently unveiled by Sacred Heart Medical Center.
Wednesday’s news conference included words of encouragement from Nadia Warren, whose breast cancer was detected in 1997 because of the free screening. She and her husband were missionaries in Mexico at the time and her health insurance didn’t cover a mammogram.
She had returned to Spokane to visit her mother and realized she hadn’t been checked for breast cancer in two years. A friend of her mother’s suggested the free screening.
“I went and had my mammogram and expected nothing, as in years past,” Warren said. “I would not have known if I had not been able to participate in this program. The care I received was superlative.”
This sidebar appeared with the story: NUMBERS Free checkups Women ages 40 to 65 who have no other means of getting breast and cervical exams may qualify for free checkups. In Spokane, call 324-1541; in Eastern Washington (888) 461-8876; in Western Washington (800) 756-5437.