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4 June/July 2006 Breast Cancer Action
BCA Board Members…
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communities and others.”
LBCA schedules appointments for
women and accompanies them to their
appointments. The group also provides onsite
translation and interpretation services.
“This has made a really big difference for our
women to acquire the free screening services.
We have the return rate. [LBCA clients return
time and again.] They call us before we send
out the [reminder] notice to them,” Olivia
said. She encourages hospitals and clinics to
provide cultural sensitivity trainings so that
their staff members understand the cultures of
the patients they’re serving. While that might
seem a small piece in a big,
bad health world, Olivia
pointed out that it makes a
big difference to her
community.
Kim Cox:
Making a Difference
Across the Bay
Across the San Francisco
Bay, Kim Cox directed
Contra Costa County’s Breast Cancer Program
from 1997 to 2002. There, she worked with
a coalition of advocates, educators, and
medical providers that addressed breast
cancer education, outreach, screening,
diagnosis, and treatment issues for uninsured,
low-income women. She has been a public
health educator and administrator for over 20
years in both the United States and abroad.
Kim is also an 10-year ovarian cancer survivor
who says, “Any day with hair is a good hair
day.”
She helped create Contra Costa County’s
Alerts by E-mail
patient navigator program, which also focuses
on community outreach. The program
recruited women from the local community,
trained them, and then employed them to talk
about early detection. Spanish-speaking
navigators would also go into the exam room
with women and interpret during the visit.
However, this was not always the case
in that county.
“If you spoke English,” Kim said,
“you could go to American Cancer
Society and get a wig. You could go to
the Wellness Community and get
support services.” But after a situation
went terribly wrong for a Spanishspeaking
patient, the agencies and
Kim’s program realized changes
needed to be made. Today, there are
more resources available for Spanish speakers
in the county.
Realizing the importance of tailoring
outreach to be appropriate for different
communities, the county also created
culturally tailored programs for the Asian
Pacific Islander community, African American
women, and lesbians. “Hospitals should really
look to their community,” Kim said.
Kim is also well-versed in the layers
upon layers of bureaucracy involved with the
various local, state, and federal programs.
Each seems to patch part of the problem, one
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“The health system is a broken one, and patient navigators
in local government and private agencies serve to fill gaps
that shouldn’t exist.”
facet of the broken
system, but only an
assurance of
universal access to
care will truly solve
the problem.
Diane Carr:
Devoted to
Women’s Health
A registered nurse since 1967 and a nurse
practitioner since 1981, Diane Carr has
dedicated her career to women’s health. She is
currently the director of Breast and Cervical
Cancer Services for the San Francisco
Department of Public Health and is a member
of the state’s Breast and Cervical Cancer
Advisory Council. Diane has also been
touched by breast cancer in her personal
life—family and friends have had the disease,
including her mother, who died in 1989. She
is particularly proud of her work with the San
Francisco Women’s Health Center/Collective
and the Coalition for the Medical Rights of
Women, which focuses on empowering
women by demanding and advocating for
quality health care for themselves and their
families.
Like many people who work in the
health field, Diane explains that the United
States’s health care system is broken, and that
the navigators she oversees help patients
overcome the obstacles inherent in this
system.
Everyone diagnosed with breast cancer at
San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH),
which is overseen by the city’s public health
department, is assigned a patient navigator to
make sure that they get the right services and
resources. Because so many languages are
spoken in San Francisco, there are navigators
at SFGH who speak Spanish, Cantonese,
Russian, and Tagalog. However, this doesn’t
cover every language group. For SFGH’s
Vietnamese-speaking patients, for example, an
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