Yale Cancer Center director and president and physician-in-chief, Eric Winer, MD, was featured as a special guest on WICC 600 AM radio in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on Tuesday, April 30. He addressed National Minority Health Month and discussed differences in cancer outcomes.
"The differences are really dramatic," said Dr. Winer. "I personally am a breast cancer doctor, so I'm going to use a breast cancer example. If you are a 20 year old white American woman, you have half the chance of dying from breast cancer by the age of 50 compared to a black American woman. That is a striking finding to me and one that I think we should all very seriously consider. And the truth is, that's true for breast cancer, but it's true for prostate cancer, it's true for myeloma, it's true for so many different kinds of cancer."
“I have been in at Yale now for two and a quarter years," said Dr. Winer. "Actually, I guess as of today, two years and three months officially. And one of the areas that not only have I prioritized, but our whole cancer center and all of Smilow is prioritizing is to address the issue of the cancer care disparities. So with that, we have recently hired a person to direct that effort, a physician by the name of Tracy Battaglia, who came to us from Boston Medical Center, where she had 20 years of experience using navigators, both nurse navigators and lane navigators to try to improve outcomes for black and hispanic individuals. And she's going to be leading this program that we hopefully over the next several years will be able to roll out across our entire network. Now, exactly what that's going to look like, I think remains to be seen. But I can assure you that it's going to include navigation. It's going to include education. And then I think the other piece is that we have no choice but to try very hard to both work with community organizations and work with donors to create funds at times that need to be used for things like paying for transportation and paying for child care. Because, you know, once again, if you're a young woman and you're trying to get your breast cancer treatment and you're a single mom of three kids and you can't miss a day of work, or else your kids aren’t going to be able to have food on the table, you're going to prioritize that and not your health care. And so we really have to address this in many different ways.”