Dr. Sumedha Penheiter
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2023
last heard Nov 2023
Dr. Sumedha Penheiter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We actually use funding mechanisms through the Alliance where we fund our partners and community members to amplify the work around these objectives.
So we have done significant amounts in each space in terms of we've created a community health worker program where we talk about insurance, again, covering community health worker charges so that they can be navigators within the system to talk about screening and detection and awareness at an early stage with the communities. So it's a multi-pronged approach.
And while I do talk about early detection, I want to say that we follow the whole spectrum from detection, but then a lot of people are in the treatment phase and the survivorship phase. So we also support them in that space. But early detection, this is an ever-evolving, innovative space. You have people that can be family or genetically predisposed to cancer that are human for early screening.
But then there's a lot that do not have familial history and yet could develop some of these cancers. Yeah.
The idea is to do early screening based on a variety of techniques, one of which is genetic testing or genetic screening and several others like diagnostics, like breast exams, and just going into communities and removing the hesitation and cultural nuances that are around testing and encouraging them to take care of their health.
Well, I think from what I understand is that There are some common denominators across the board, but there's also unique factors. Starting with urban, I think I can point out that there's a lot more access in the areas of urban clinics. However, I feel that there's still, depending on what city you live in, transportation can still be a barrier.
And in urban areas, people are working, you know, some cases around the clock. So making time for health appointments and coming in to get their screening done. And a lot of efforts are in clinical trial space to address and understand cancer and provide state-of-the-art therapeutics to make sure that cancers are cured if they are indeed
occurring and there's just that social determinants of health are much more complex in urban areas, although they exist in rural areas as well, but they're different. And so the complexity of the social determinants of health with an additional factors that contribute to risk of cancer, such as environment and pollution, definitely add to that burden.
So I think the strategy has to be different, again, based on the cancer burden, which is different, but also the social determinants of health, which vary between rural and urban areas. And in rural areas, access is a concern. A lot of rural communities have to drive for miles before they can come to a place where they can see a physician or get treatment.
And in that, we've worked hard to establish pilot hubs in the rural areas through the Minnesota Clinical Cancer Trial Network. to have some of these clinical trials available in some of the smaller communities within greater Minnesota. So there's different factors and different social determinants of health, although they exist in both.
They just, the strategy to address them are different based on what they are. There's more food insecurity in urban areas. There's more, you know, inability to walk and get exercise because obesity does help just lead to cancer occurrence.
There's just not as much available even though there is a lot of money in terms of the underserved community being able to access clean trails, to be able to walk to school, to be able to, I mean, just the difficult gap between neighborhoods is immense.
Like I shared, you know, we're kind of using the same playbook with some modifications for the new cancer plan that we're formulating And it was very much based on listening sessions. We call them listening sessions that were at the grassroots level to understand the burden.
But in addition, we fund a lot of grants through the strategy action group is what we call them, where we target any time we have an initiative, we need to make sure that there's community engagement and community involvement. and always, always a community partner as a co-partner if possible. So that's kind of our strategy that we adopt to make sure there's community engagement.
Like I shared, you know, we worked on legislation to get a grant funded for community health workers. We worked with the community health workers organizations in Minnesota very closely to ensure that their work could be covered and paid for. So community is definitely the center of our work.
I think I would like to say that when the cancer plan is formed, there is definitely the burden and the local burden, but also to understand that we rely heavily on our partners. So the feasibility is definitely an aspect of what we end up doing in the sense that we are relying heavily on our extended partners, and somewhat on MDH to help us with the initiatives that we formed.
So a lot of times it seems that whatever the interest of our steering committee members as well as our partners on earth is what we solicit to advance certain initiatives. So I feel that it's very, this is a multifactorial issue when you say prevention it's hard to know what prevention should look like if you don't have data.
And so we have focused highly on getting accurate data, current data, and making sure that a recent win in the legislative efforts was to make sure that the data that Minnesota collects is now linked to other Kansas plans as well as to the CDC. And that was something that we requested through the legislature, and it was a win for us. So, you know, accurate data is one.
And we've funded a lot of grants, strategy action grants around breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening. We always have had patient survivors, advocacy groups, and coaches. coalition leaders as part of our members who have gone and brought our message forward, as well as helped bring in the needs of the state and overall the cancer in concern.
We have also worked with the lung cancer screening task force that was established. And so in addition to screening, you know, the tactical aspect of the technical aspect of screening, There's a lot of information or support that needs to be provided before and after. So we worked in a lot of those support services as well, where we hosted support center events for patients and their families.
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