Putting Breast Health First: Establishing No-Cost Comprehensive Breast Care for the Indigent and Underinsured Requires a Well-Orchestrated Community Collaboration

Abstract

Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center's unique CARE Network in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is used as a best-practice model to illustrate what can be achieved when breast cancer care facilities set aside politics and collaborate to put women's breast health needs first. How the CARE Network, working in partnership with other health care agencies, was established to meet a regional need and how it has maximized various funding sources to provide free mobile mammography and comprehensive breast cancer services to an uninsured and underinsured population is described. The essential services required to reach and treat this population to help lower the rate of breast cancer deaths in a state which has one of the highest cancer mortality rates in the country are delineated.