Outreach Across the Map

The Tennessee Comprehensive Cancer Control Coalition (TC4) is able to accomplish its goals through generous support from member organizations, including in-kind contributions and time commitments from health care executives like Anne Washburn, MPH, associate director of the Office of Patient and Community Education at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center.

“The beauty of the Coalition is that when people from all of these health care, advocacy, government and nonprofit groups come together we can leverage our resources,” Washburn said. “We each spend time on cancer projects in our daily 8-to-5 jobs, but when we come to the Coalition we’re taking off our daily hats and coming together as a group of citizens who want to do good things for all of the citizens of our state by reducing the burden of cancer.”

That includes outreach and education for all Tennessee citizens.

“We are wonderfully fortunate in this country to have resources like the National Institutes of Health, the National Cancer Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” said Washburn. “They’re developing wonderful information about health care, but until we actually take it out to our communities and disseminate that information, it’s not worth much.”

As a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center has a special mission to provide educational outreach. While many health care organizations may call themselves “comprehensive,” NCI designation requires more than state-of-the-art cancer care and services. It also includes a strong research base as well as a wide spectrum of activities to support cancer education and prevention. Vanderbilt-Ingram is one of just two Comprehensive Cancer Centers in Tennessee and 40 in the nation. A strong history of community outreach is one of the reasons for that recognition.

“We focus on being creative in our outreach and mindful of the different populations we’re trying to reach,” Washburn explained. “We have to think about minorities, the underserved, low literacy rates in some areas, and how people learn when we’re trying to give them relevant health care information. We also recognize that there are enormous disparities in the availability of resources across the state.”

From Memphis to Mountain City, TC4 members are identifying those disparities and trying to fill in the gaps so they can help all Tennesseans.

Washburn is the TC4 state chair for the Cancer Care committee, a group of professionals with expertise in the continuum of cancer care, quality of life, palliative care and survivorship issues.
“Our committee has recognized that, for patients and families, there is a lack of resources focusing on end-of-life issues, and those resources vary dramatically from one county to the next,” Washburn said. “So we have done an assessment of each county in the state to determine what palliative care and end-of-life resources exist, and we’ve put together a database. We’re working with members in each region of the state to determine the best way to implement that database to ensure that patients, caregivers and health professionals know about these resources in their area.”

Washburn says the Coalition recognizes that each region of the state is quite different, with varying populations, cancer incidence, and mortality rates.

“It is gratifying that we all see the big cancer picture and the demanding issues related to cancer prevention, and we’re able to divide up and tackle specific issues for the benefit of all of our citizens.”

More information about the TC4 at: http://health.state.tn.us/cccp/index.htm.