Dr. Sumedha Penheiter

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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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Health Chatter · Minnesota State Cancer Plan · 17 Nov 2023 podcast

So the Minnesota Cancer Alliance is actually an organization that's formed in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Health. And it's a result of the new CDC requirement that all states receiving cancer funding must have a state plan and should be done independent of the guidance of MDA, direct guidance, and really be an outcome of public awareness, public concerns, and public needs.

The main purpose of the Minnesota Cancer Alliance is really to form this cancer plan independently in collaboration with the community and focus on the spectrum from etiology to detection to cure and then palliative care or survivorship. So I feel the Alliance is an organic evolution

It was initiated around the cancer plan, but it is a lot of advocates as well as institutions, health institutions, advocacy institutions, all gathered together to help reduce the burden of cancer across the state of Minnesota.

Definitely. I think you spoke very elegantly. It is the framework that is written and documented and a guideline that helps us go back and see where our efforts are productive, where they need more energy, and also...

For us to point out what the burdens are and bring it to the attention of the general public as well as state level, there can be a lot of individual efforts that are not concerted and then although they are very valuable, sometimes collective efforts lead to collective actions which are more impactful. So this helps identify

what the framework is, but then also for individuals, like I shared, you know, they're able to use these as guidelines in their own community partnerships, action groups to further their work and reduce the burden of cancer. So it's a nice guideline, as I would say, for people to go to. So I agree. I think the framework is very necessary.

And it also helps, you know, everybody's so focused in their specific space. Clinicians are very focused on diagnosis and treatment. And then there's this financial legal companies that are focused very much on the financial legal part of it. Insurance clinical trials group focuses very much on making sure that, you know, state-of-the-art clinical therapeutics are available to the patients.

So everybody can end up being kind of in their own very focused, silo is not the right word, but field. And I think this plan then kind of also connects the dots between all aspects of cancer from, you know, prevention, detection to all the way to survivorship. And it's a composite picture so that not just one aspect of the disease gets more of the attention or effort.

No, like I said, a lot of it is the success. We gauge our success as reality. enforcing or emboldening something to policy. I think the biggest successes from what I see based on the evaluation database is we have really addressed the HPV vaccination issue. The Minnesota Commission on Cancer has presented to a lot of medical professionals on increasing HPV vaccinations.

We've funded some stakeholder advisory groups and trained young leaders on the information of HPV and really tried to bring awareness of this very preventable cancer to a lot of areas. And I think we've seen a lot of effort and success database in adoption of the vaccine. in young preteen adolescents, despite of a lot of hesitation in both males and females.

So I think HPV cancer vaccination and awareness of the HPV cancers has been a very successful aspect of it. I also think tobacco use in general, we've presented several times and advocated for statewide legislation for raising the age of tobacco to 21. And that was passed into a law in 2020. We also advocated for 2019 legislative session to ban e-cigarette use indoors.

And so I think tobacco has always been kind of like a favorite spot of the policy committee and also ours in general. But like I would say, the success has been weaving in health inequities as a premise in every single objective. We have come away from not only focusing on the greatest, but for the greatest number of all, but also for those that are not in the greatest number.

And I think that just the understanding of health inequities and the availability of clinical care, as well as survivorship, and how differently it impacts some community versus the other and making sure that that's kept in mind. I think that's been the biggest success. It's just increasing awareness and focus on health inequities in addition to overall cancer care.

I think when it comes down to it, it's the Minnesota Department of Health that is the center point of receiving funding and reallocating funding for the work we do is the one that sends these reports. But we definitely have input on that and we definitely review that. And we have an evaluation committee within our alliance as well where we have evaluation scientists that

continuously review and evaluate on how we're doing in terms of, you know, indicators, the success, the effort put in, and the barriers addressed. And so the answer is it's MDH, Minnesota Department of Health, that sends the progress reports on a regular basis. But definitely it's not something that we do just for reporting purposes.

We constantly review our strategies and tactics and the efforts that have gone in and how much we've done.

So the plan, the leadership team for the plan is already in place and they've done a lot of great work already. Heather Keene is leading the actual plan team, formed an advisory team. And what we have done is we've really used, we've gone within our alliance and used the equity portion to inform us on the cancer health, through the Cancer Health Equity Network, which is again, one of the

within the alliance that focuses on health equity. We have brought the policy committee in, the evaluation committee in, and then we have the community listening sessions that we have started with our partners. We had a summit not too long ago where we did some listening sessions to understand the burden. We are looking at the Minnesota cancer reporting systems to see what our current burden is.

And then also the commission on cancer network for the practice aspect of it. So we are looking at the playbook from other cancer plans that we feel have similar burdens and dynamics as the state of Minnesota. We are looking at the last plan as really some of the things that were very successful in establishing that plan, the lessons from that playbook.

But like I said, we are using a multi-pronged approach with equity policy evaluation community data and practice to make sure that we form this plan. So although it will be a similar framework, I think it will be very current and informed based on the recent concerns and burdens of cancer and making sure that every objective has health equity embedded, like I said, to eliminate health equity.

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