Funded by the Victory Ride to Cure Cancer
All cancer patients should have the opportunity to get very good care through research studies. Research studies are important to make cancer treatments and survival from cancer better but very few people of color are treated on cancer research studies called clinical trials. One way to solve this problem is to use specially trained staff to help cancer patients better understand clinical trials. These staff are called patient navigators. In this project, we will use patient navigators to teach and support patients asked to be in a cancer research study. These navigators will work as a team to make sure that all African Americans who receive care at the Cancer Center are considered for a clinical trial. In order for the patient navigator to know which patients may be fit to participate in research, we will use information from the medical record to create a list of patients that could be asked about their interest to get treatment with a clinical trial. The patient navigator will use this list to contact patients and will teach patients about clinical trials and connect patients to finance counselors, social workers and other helpful community services as needed. To understand if the project is a success, we will compare the total number of patients, by race, treated on a cancer research study before and after the project.
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