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Breast Health Access for Women with Disabilities
Your Gift Will
- Provide access for more disabled women to breast health information, screenings, and early breast cancer detection
- Ensure adequate resources to design a program model for use nationally
See www.bhawd.org for details
Background
Most women take for granted the ability to get a mammogram and perform self-breast exams. Yet for women with functional disabilities, these seemingly simple precautions are out of reach.
San Francisco Bay Area has had the highest rate of breast cancer in the world. At the same time, the Bay Area is also the birthplace of the disability rights movement and the residence of a large disabled population. In Alameda and Contra Costa Counties alone, 142,000 adult women (17% of the female population) require special assistance with functions of daily living.
For these women, self-breast examination may be difficult because of motor and neurological impairments, cognitive and developmental disabilities, visual defects and chronic health conditions. In addition, most physicians and health care facilities do not have the special examining tables or wheelchair-accessible mammography machines needed to adequately screen women with disabilities.
A collaboration, begun in 1995, between Alta Bates Summit Medical Center, the Center for Independent Living, and United Cerebral Palsy, resulted in the formation of Breast Health Access for Women with Disabilities (BHAWD). BHAWD has identified the barriers that women encounter in getting breast cancer screening services and has focused on adaptive methods that utilize a woman's functional abilities to compensate for her specific limitations. Clinic and educational outreach programs have begun on a limited basis, but the need for such services is enormous.
The Challenge:
Alta Bates Summit Medical Center opened the first accessible breast health clinic in 1997. It includes a wheelchair accessible mammography machine and a universally accessible, multi-tilt examining table. A nurse breast specialist and an intake facilitator staff the clinic part-time. A health educator is needed to reach out to the community. Additional clinical staff is also needed. BHAWD, the first program of its kind nationally, is being designed for replication nationwide. See www.bhawd.org site for more details.
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