Funded by the 2018 Victory Ride to Cure Cancer
Clinical trials are important to improve cancer treatments and survival. Very few people are treated on cancer clinical trials and an even small number of those treated on a trial are African American. One way to solve this problem is to use specially trained staff to help cancer patients better understand clinical trials. These staff are called patient navigators. In this project, we will use patient navigators, one who is African American, to teach and support patients asked to be in cancer clinical trials. These navigators will work as a team to make sure that all African Americans who receive care at the Cancer Center are considered for cancer clinical trials. They will teach patients about clinical trials. They will also help them better understand the hospital system and give advice to patients who live far away and don’t have a car or place to stay when they come to their appointments. They can connect patients to finance counselors, social workers and other helpful community
services. To understand if the project is a success, we will compare the total number of patients, by race, treated on cancer clinical trials before and after the project. We will also study why patients chose not to be on clinical trials even when they are eligible. This information will help us design new projects in the future.
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