Penn students may spend the majority of their time at school within city limits, but some in the School of Nursing leave the urban bubble to provide care for a rural community.
The Webster County Cancer Education Project, a collaborative program between the Nursing School and various health and service providers, benefits a rural Appalachian community in West Virginia. It is organized by Nursing professor Wendy Grube and operated by graduate students studying Women’s Health Care and Family Nursing.
The students provide free breast and cervical cancer screening for more than 150 women in the region twice a year, according to Grube. The ultimate goal is to reduce cancer incidence and mortality, with an emphasis on breast and cervical cancer prevention.
“The lack of adequate primary care in rural areas is America’s dirty little secret,” said Grube. “Cervical cancer is something that can be treated, and yet at one point rural communities had the highest death rate from cervical cancer in the country.”
“Cervical cancer is a preventable disease — no woman should die from it,” said 2007 Nursing graduate Christina Pherson. “However, without annual screenings, women of Webster Springs are left vulnerable.”
“We always focus on ethnic minorities, forgetting that the rural ones need help too,” Grube added.
In order to combat the ignorance about cancer screening in this area of West Virginia, the services provided include educational programs on primary and secondary cancer prevention, cancer screening clinics that provide appropriate free screenings for community members and data analysis on the impact of these screenings.
The clinic was one of 38 international case studies to be featured in the 2009 World Health Organization publication Now More Than Ever: The Contribution of Nurses and Midwives to Primary Health Care.
The WHO publication cited the clinic as one of the examples that address issues like universal coverage, gender equality and health-related human rights at the micro-level.
Most of the women tested at the clinic have never been screened before.
“It’s women helping women,” said Grube. “The women being tested are now so involved that they go around the community door to door to get more women to come out for screening.”
Male students from the Nursing School have also gone out to the area to give prostrate exams.
“We need to explode some of the myths about Appalachia,” said Grube. “We thrive on stereotypes that keep providers away from these areas.”
Most of the students who take part in the project end up in careers in rural health care.
“Our goal is to train the next generation of providers to tackle these healthcare challenges in rural areas,” she added.
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