Shuttle Eases Access to Cancer Center for South-Central Patients

Not long ago Norman Mitchell had to pull his frail frame out of bed every weekday morning to take a two-hour bus ride from his South-Central Los Angeles home, transferring three times, just to receive radiation treatment for his rectal cancer at a USC facility in Boyle Heights.

Now, thanks to a free shuttle service provided by the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, Mitchell, 54, has a driver in an air-conditioned van take him from his front door to the center and back, about 45 minutes each way.

“Everything he does is perfect,” Mitchell, a retired welder, said of his driver.

But Mitchell is one of only a few cancer patients in South-Central who have used the two-month-old van service to the center, which specializes in clinical trials and advanced cancer treatments.

USC doctors believe that the program’s slow start is because of a lack of information about medical care in the inner city and a reluctance among many African Americans to participate in clinical trials because of the notorious Tuskegee, Ala., medical study in which black men suffering from syphilis went untreated for many years, starting in the 1930s.

“We want to use the van to combat the fear of experimental trials,” said Yochanan Israel, who manages the shuttle program.

The van, which can carry up to six patients per day, is paid for by a $342,500 two-year grant from the California Community Foundation, using proceeds from the 1996 sale of the then-nonprofit Centinela Hospital Medical Center to a private, for-profit operator.

The shuttle serves only South-Central because state lawmakers have required proceeds from the sale of Centinela to benefit the area the hospital served. But doctors say the area also is targeted because black and Latino residents there have limited access to medical care and have historically been underrepresented in clinical trials. (For more information call [800] 872-2273.)

Oscar Streeter, chief of radiation oncology at the Norris Center, said he and other doctors are trying to fight an erroneous assumption among some blacks that African Americans don’t react as well to medical treatments in clinical trials as the rest of the population.

To combat that false assumption and overcome the fear created by the Tuskegee study, Streeter plans a series of town hall meetings in South-Central in the next few weeks to spread the word about the shuttle service and the cancer treatments available at the Norris Center.

“We’ve never reached out to that community,” he said.

Without the van, Streeter said patients such as Mitchell, who couldn’t drive to the center because of his frail condition, would have trouble getting any treatment.

“Mr. Mitchell is the kind of patient who needs constant TLC, so the van is important to him,” he said.

Streeter added that the van can dramatically improve the chances of recovery by reducing the stress that many cancer patients undergo trying to find transportation to the center.

He said Lorease Walker, an 83-year-old grandmother from South-Central who was recently treated for breast cancer at the Norris Center, initially rode the bus or got a ride from a cousin.

Her reaction to the cancer treatment improved dramatically once she began using the shuttle van and no longer had to worry about transportation, Streeter said.

In the next few weeks, doctors at the Norris Center will begin clinical trials on a new radiation treatment for breast cancer that will reduce the normal treatment time of five weeks to five days.

The drawback is that patients will have to receive treatment at the center twice a day for the five days. But Streeter believes that won’t be a problem for most patients because of the shuttle.

“You can have all the money in the world and all the technology that you can, but if they can’t get here, they can’t get here,” Streeter said.