Empowering Community Cancer Care: Importance of Collaboration

In this episode of OncChats: Empowering Community Cancer Care, Amanda M. Woodworth, MD, of Keck Medicine of USC at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, and Anirudh Rai, MD, of Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital, discuss the significance of community-based cancer care, emphasizing that most cancers are diagnosed locally and highlighting the importance of collaboration between primary care physicians and specialists to provide optimal education and treatment.

Woodworth: Hi. My name is Dr Amanda Woodworth. I am a breast surgical oncologist and the director of breast health for Keck Medicine of USC at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. We have entered into a really exciting joint venture providing cancer services for the Santa Clarita community with Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital. We get to work with all sorts of primary care physicians and other physicians in the community, and today, I’m really excited to be joined by Dr Rai to talk about this really important relationship that we have in the community. It turns out that over 85% of cancers are actually diagnosed in the community, and 80% of patients prefer to be treated in the community. So, Dr Rai, can you talk a little bit about the importance of treating patients in the community they live in?

Rai: Yeah, absolutely. Welcome everyone. My name is Dr Anirudh Rai, and we’re here to kind of touch upon these points about the importance of community when it comes to treating cancer. It’s true that a lot of cancer diagnoses are made in the primary care setting. To give you an idea, we diagnose cancer about once a month per se, but the idea is patients come to us in the primary care setting with symptoms that are pretty nonspecific, and then we, in turn, try to do our due diligence, do the proper paperwork and blood work, and find out what’s going on. We ultimately end up sending them to the specialist.

Ideally, we [look at the] symptoms, [which] are very, very important, and we always do our due diligence to make sure it’s not cancer. More often than not, we have to be a bit cautious. Patients don’t [always] know where to go with these symptoms. Thankfully, [if] they come to their primary care doctor, [that doctor] would do the work and send them to the proper specialist. And that’s where the importance comes in, to have a community where the patient is close to home, close to these sort of resources to help them in these troubling times—[whether] it is a diagnosis of cancer [or] symptoms that are concerning, it’s important to have the resources and the support to collaborate with them, with our community, with their family, as well, to make sure that they’re treated well and are informed well.

Education, for the most part, is incredibly vital when it comes to being a physician, as a primary care physician and also as a cancer physician or a surgeon. Essentially, the title of doctor comes from teacher, so it’s important to teach our patients. Thankfully, in our community, we have plenty of ways to educate our patients. I personally do a lot of podcasts. We do a lot of talks and a lot of events in the community to educate on the importance of screening for cancer, the importance of their primary care doctor, and the importance of honestly sharing their feelings with their families as well, because ultimately, it’s a whole family unit that plays a role in this endeavor.