Team effort brings cancer screening to the community

Last fall, Overseer Claude White sat in the front-row pew of his church with Mark Darby of the UNMC College of Nursing and talked about cancer.

A member of White’s family had grappled with breast cancer. Another was diagnosed with lymphoma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The experiences were more painful, White thought, because of attitudes the family faced from some of the people providing care. Attitudes, he said, that seemed to stem from the fact that the family was Black. 

“We were well capable of paying whatever was necessary, but yet we were treated as if we were not significant,” he said.

White, overseer of the Church of the Living God Temple 33 near 21st and Binney streets, was aware of other stories in his community, in which people felt that because of race, they faced challenges and barriers that others might not.

“There were people who would not go to a doctor,” he said. “They lost their trust in their doctors.”

But they would go to church.

That conversation was the genesis of the One-Stop Cancer Shop, a coalition of seven community partners that, supported by UNMC, Nebraska Medicine and the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, provided cancer screenings to more than 140 community members at two events held in North and South Omaha this fall.

Residents who came in to take part in the community events, held at Mount Calvary Community Church in September and the Nebraska Urban Indian Health Coalition in October, could receive free or low-cost cancer screenings for breast, lung, colorectal and prostate cancer.

Darby, who helped organize the events, called them “an extraordinary partnership between seven community organizations, dozens of community volunteers and an academic medical center – Nebraska Medicine, UNMC College of Nursing and the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center.”

Community partners for the screening events included: Mount Calvary Community Church; Church of the Living God Temple 33; Christ-Love Unity Church; North Omaha Area Health; My Sister’s Keeper; North Omaha Chapter AARP; and the Nebraska Urban Indian Health Coalition. The first screening was held Sept. 28 at Mount Calvary Community Church.

White said that when the Nebraska Urban Indian Health Coalition joined the effort, it allowed the One-Stop Cancer Shop to serve Black, Indigenous, Latino and other underserved communities in both North and South Omaha.

The effort to make both events work, UNMC’s Darby said, “laid a foundation of trust and outreach  of which we can all be proud.”

Joann Sweasy, PhD, director of the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, said: “A major goal of the cancer center is to reduce the cancer burden in Nebraska. One way to do this is to ensure that everyone has access to cancer screening. We were delighted to partner with the community and the UNMC College of Nursing to accomplish this goal.”

Shinobu Watanabe-Galloway, MD, associate director of community outreach and engagement at the Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center, emphasized that the event’s success was rooted in the strong mobilization efforts of community leaders. She highlighted the vital contributions of Darby, who played a pivotal role in engaging the community.

“Two things that are really hard: bringing the community to the event and managing the health care logistics,” she noted. “Nebraska Medicine and the cancer center excelled in the health care logistics, and Mark was outstanding at community outreach.”

Dr. Watanabe-Galloway also praised the exceptional coordination by Nebraska Medicine’s Rachael Schmidt, assistant director for the Community Outreach and Engagement Office’s cancer education and screening, and Michaela Newman, executive director-oncology. Their efforts included organizing professional volunteers, streamlining the intake process and organizing the screenings and navigation services regarding follow up.

Reflecting on the collective effort, Dr. Watanabe-Galloway said, “That’s kind of the Nebraska thing, right? We always want to work collaboratively with others and shy away from taking credit for ourselves. But this truly was a team effort.”

Lepaine Sharp-McHenry, DNP, who met with White in the early planning stages of the event, attended both events to support the effort, which included a number of nursing-student volunteers.

“This event exceeded our expectations,” Dr. Sharp-McHenry said. “To serve our community by providing cancer screening and education, is an opportunity to collaborate with the community while building trusting relationships.”

The volunteers were “awesome,” White said, including the nursing students.

“We could not have done it without the volunteers,” he said. “They went above and beyond to ensure that the attendees were taken care of.”

Claire Thiele was one of the nursing students who volunteered at the events.

“You know, it’s extremely important for me to be out here today, just to get out in the community and be hands-on with people who maybe don’t have as many resources or access to health care,” she said during the Mount Calvary Community Church event. “As a nursing student, this is a great opportunity for me to work with everyone who has come to be screened.”

White sees this fall’s events as a good beginning, and meetings already have been held to plan events for 2025, possibly this time in both the fall and the spring.

“If just one individual comes and takes part, it’s a success, because that’s one individual in the community that would not have been treated otherwise,” he said. “And once the word started spreading, we started hearing the confidence and the buy-in of people in the community and their excitement.

“These attendees were able to receive care and screening for little to no cost,” he said. “That is the model that we will continue going forward.

“I believe that these events will definitely be a tool that will tighten the gap of trust in our neighborhoods and our communities,” he said.