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Cook County Stops Mammogram Vans
Produced by Catrin Einhorn on Thursday, June 21, 2007
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| Cook County mobile mammogram van in a parking lot at Stroger Hospital |
We continue now with our series on how Cook County cutbacks and layoffs are affecting people who live here.
About one in eight American women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime.
Within that group, African American women from Chicago will die at much higher rates than their white counterparts.
Routine mammograms protect women, and for years, Cook County has tried to encourage them by using vans to bring the technology into the neighborhoods.
But the county's two mobile mammogram vans have been pulled off the streets.
They ceased to operate in March.
Chicago Public Radio's Catrin Einhorn reports.
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This time, Bertha Carpenter had decided to book the mammogram vans early.
Every year her south side church holds a health fair, on the second Saturday in July.
She says the mammogram vans were a big hit-the slots always filled up.
But her church had missed out recently because other groups scheduled first.
So for this summer, Carpenter says she tried to reserve the vans nine months in advance, and then followed up in March.
That's when she heard the vans were no longer available--to anyone.
CARPENTER: She told me that the program had ended. I had not heard it on television or anything. So I was just really shocked and I was disappointed too, because a lot of the community was really looking forward for them to come.
One of the people looking forward to the vans was 66-year-old Minnie Patton, who also attends church at New Hope Community Baptist.
The mammograms were free, and the vans parked right outside, big white vehicles the size of campers.
PATTON: Coming here and having it was just like coming and visiting my family, cause I consider New Hope and the members my family. And I was just very comfortable with that.
When the mammogram vans didn't come last year because of a scheduling conflict, Patton says she didn't get the screening.
She says she doesn't drive, and it seemed like too much trouble and waiting to go to the hospital.
There are other reasons some people-especially those who are poor-don't get mammograms.
Maybe they don't have the kind of job where they can easily take a day off.
Maybe they're scared of hospital bills, or just hospitals in general. Advocates say for these people, the vans provided a kind of mammogram safety net that's suddenly gone.
ANDREWS: People are going to slip through the cracks and more people will die of this disease.
Jude Andrews runs Y-ME Illinois, an advocacy group for those with breast cancer.
ANDREWS: I think there's no other conclusion you can come to, because if they don't get screened in the van, these people aren't going to go elsewhere.
But what's a disturbing loss to some people makes sense to others who also fight breast cancer.
DUNNE: We are in a cost saving mode here to try to survive.
Patrick Dunne is acting chair of radiology at Cook County's Stroger Hospital.
DUNNE: Delivering care on mobile mammography vans is not the most cost efficient way to deliver care. Because you have the cost of drivers, clerks, technologists, and maintenance on a vehicle.
Dunne says the vans can do only about 28 mammograms a day, and he says they're not as popular in the winter.
But County doctors say the decision to stop the vans wasn't just about efficiency or saving money.
They say it helps them treat the most critical cases first.
Pamela Ganschow runs the hospital's Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening Program.
GANSCHOW: Using the limited resources we have left after the budget cuts, we're able to provide many more mammograms to women at Stroger, than we would if we started taking our personnel and sending them out with the van.
And staffers at Stroger have their hands full.
They're working down a two-year backlog of mammograms that ballooned to about 11,000, according to Dr. Ganschow.
5,300 were referrals for people who had some kind of breast problem-a lump, discharge, pain-or an abnormal mammogram that needed follow up.
She says some of those women-women with symptoms of breast cancer-have waited up to two years for a mammogram.
That delay can mean the difference between beating the disease and dying of it.
And that's why Ganschow and other County doctors want to turn all their attention to these cases.
GANSCHOW: We've actually been able to grease the wheel in mammography, and that is try to get the maximum number of appointments using the staff that we have.
Ganschow says at this point, they've gotten through all the most serious referrals, and the backlog of diagnostic mammograms is down to about 18-hundred.
One way they've accomplished that, besides stopping the vans, is by no longer providing mammograms at Stroger for women who don't have noticeable breast problems.
Instead, they're sending those women to other hospitals, where a program funded with state and federal money foots the bill.
But Dr. David Ansell, a breast cancer researcher and Chief Medical Officer at Rush Medical Center, says women deserve to get basic care-like routine mammograms-within their health care system.
ANSELL: Doctors like Dr. Dunne and Dr. Ganschow and others are forced into situations that may be appropriate for a battlefield, which is triage, but not appropriate for healthcare in the greatest country in the world, in one of the greatest cities in the country. Absolutely unacceptable. And if we continue to tolerate this as a city, we're going to see more women die.
Ansell has convened a task force to look at breast cancer in Chicago and why black women are dying at a much higher rates than their white counterparts--70 percent higher in 2003.
He says their recommendations will be released in October.
Ansell himself was at County for 17 years, and he remembers when the vans started.
He wasn't a fan.
He thinks they serve a purpose, but he says it makes much more sense to have regular mammograms offered at accessible, fixed locations across the whole city.
He says that way, a woman's records could be saved and compared year to year, for instance, and more women in Chicago would detect breast cancer early and survive.
I'm Catrin Einhorn…Chicago Public Radio
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