HJBR Jan/Feb 2022

CANCER WARS 24 JAN / FEB 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   MBP continued... Stevens: Yeah. I think the other thing I want to add is that, we started with the cancer incidents and mortality, and that I’ve made comments about Mary Bird using that infor- mation as a way to address the mission and I mentioned that Mary Bird, as a commu- nity nonprofit, is here to make people’s lives better. Back in 2002, when we recognized this gap in mortality rates, that too many people were dying of cancer in Louisiana, largely because they had a late-stage diag- nosis or didn’t have access to early detec- tion at all, our board authorized us back in 2002 to start, what we called at the time, the Care Network. The Care Network has grown into what’s now a Prevention on the Go team. That’s an entire team of individuals that all they do is focus on going into communities across Southeast Louisiana, now up into the Delta, and they bring free community cancer screening and navigation into com- munities. They provide those services where people work and where they live at times when they’re conveniently available, so they do it on nights and weekends and early in the morning so that people who are working don’t have to leave their workplace. Four or five years ago, we started a workplace com- ponent of Prevention on the Go, largely due to one of our corporate sponsors coming to us and saying, hey, we don’t believe our employees who have insurance are avail- ing themselves of early detection as much as they should; and they funded a grant for us to investigate that, and they were right. We found that employees with health insurance get screened at about the same rate sometimes as people that don’t have health insurance, so we started our corpo- rate Prevention on the Go program. As a consequence, we’ve screened over 100,000 people and diagnosed thousands of cancers and seen the stage of diagnosis move way up from when we first started the commu- nity program. For example, we were diag- nosing women with breast cancer at stage 3 or later, and today, that’s moved down to stage 2A. So, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of trust in the communities using the resources that we’ve been able to make available through our Prevention on the Go program. “We have seen that across the landscape and healthcare, that rising tide of competition has driven more resources to be available to cancer patients. It would be impossible for any organization, be it Ochsner or FMOL or Mary Bird or the Baton Rouge General or Woman’s Hospital, to take care of all the cancer patients. All of us need to be better, and when we make an investment that drives people to be better, awesome; when another organization makes an investment that makes us want to be better, guess who wins? Patients.” –TODD STEVENS, MARY BIRD PERKINS What I would like to draw attention to is that that medical physics program, which you can do a little quick research on the LSU website, College of Science and ours, you’ll see how robust that program is and nationally competitive; how this Prevention on the Go program that’s improved thou- sands of lives and save hundreds of lives since it started; and then the MRI-LINAC, as an example — those three things would not exist in Louisiana in absence of an organi- zation that was started in 1968 with a sole focus on cancer and a community board that has built a following and helped us raise money to make all those things possible. I think, when you step away from all of the information and all of the news out there, you want to have those resources available to push the envelope, to help peo- ple and make everybody more competitive. We think the existence of Mary Bird and all the support we get from thousands of donors and the support of all of the patients that we’ve cared for over the years is going to continue to drive our care better, and it’s going to make everybody else better, too. n