This Man is Helping Those Who Cannot Afford Access to Care
For more than 35 years, Susan G. Komen® has been fighting alongside trailblazers in communities across the country who have committed their lives to helping create a world without breast cancer. Andrew Gardner, community health director and cancer program leader, is on the front lines in the fight against breast cancer, working to save lives every day by ensuring all women can get an accurate diagnosis and begin the treatment they need, regardless of their ability to pay.
Susan G. Komen recently sat down with Andrew to learn more about how his work is helping to decrease the health care disparity in our communities. Here is what he had to say.
Question: What services are you providing for breast cancer patients?
Answer: We service women and men who have breast cancer or may have breast cancer. So, we do a lot of screening around mammography and ultrasound to help with the diagnosis and treatment of that disease.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about the patients you see?
A: We see insured patients, but we also have those patients that have no insurance or are underinsured, which are the ones that are most at risk because those are the people who don’t tend to get into the system to get the treatment that they need. With Susan G Komen, we no longer have to turn patients away. Those patients that were uninsured or underinsured, Susan G Komen has helped us because we can now take them from a screening to the actual diagnosis and get them into treatment.
Q: Would you mind sharing a story on one of the patients that you guys have seen and helped?
A: A young lady came in for a screening. She didn’t have the money to have a screening done… Susan G. Komen [funding helped] to get her screening done. The screening was positive. We weren’t initially able to make contact with her, so we followed up with the physician. I got the young lady to come back and we followed up with some further testing and a biopsy, and she was actually able to get in treatment. She told us that had we not been persistent in getting her back for further testing, she wouldn’t have come back to find the diagnosis.
