President's Cancer Panel Begins Regional Meetings on Cancer Care

National Cancer Institute
Wednesday, 6 September 2000

The President's Cancer Panel (PCP) has begun a series of regional meetings over the next nine months to hear testimony from all 50 states addressing the question, "Why don't all Americans get the best available cancer care?"

The Panel will hear testimony from people who have met barriers in obtaining access to care as well as from care givers of all types - physicians, nurses, social workers, patients, advocates, consumers and health care officials.

The first meeting was held June 15-16 in Omaha, Neb. Additional meetings are scheduled for Sept. 14-15, 2000, in Burlington, Vt.; Oct. 12-13, 2000, in Billings, Mont.; Nov. 16-17, 2000, in Nashville, Tenn.; January 2001 in California; March 2001 in New Mexico, and May 2001 in Washington, D.C. By the end of the series of seven meetings, the Panel will have received testimony from all 50 states.

Death rates for particular cancers vary by region, and researchers have found large disparities by socioeconomic status in the availability of quality cancer care, according to Harold P. Freeman, M.D., chairman of the Panel and chief executive officer and president of the North General Hospital in New York City. At the recent PCP meeting in Omaha, Freeman said, "Poverty places people in social circumstances leading to less information, poor living conditions, risk-promoting lifestyles, and lack of access to preventive care services." He cited a need to understand better how culture, attitudes, lifestyle, and lack of access to appropriate information and medical resources all influence the diseases people get and how they deal with illness when it occurs.

In the 1999 annual report of the President's Cancer Panel, sent to President Clinton in June 2000, Freeman emphasized the equal importance of research and delivery of care in reducing the cancer burden of the American population, and said that "...the current barriers keeping quality cancer prevention and care from reaching people in all of the neighborhoods of the Nation must be overcome. Moreover, the unequal burden of cancer carried by the poor, ethnic minorities, and the under served must be relieved."

The PCP regional meetings are part of a continuing effort to explore local issues that may be preventing Americans from receiving appropriate cancer care. Speakers are being asked to describe examples of barriers to cancer care that they have witnessed or experienced, and to help identify ways to overcome those obstacles to care. In particular, the Panel is looking for community-based programs that are addressing local problems of care delivery which may be models for other communities across the United States.

The Panel is also receiving comments at a Web site set up for the regional meetings: http://www.PCPmeetings.org.

A report to the president, targeted for late 2001, will summarize the Panels findings and make recommendations for national and local policies that will support efforts to provide equal access to cancer care in the United States.

For more information, or to contact National Cancer Institute, see their website at: www.cancer.gov