For two weeks in June, Penn Medicine’s mobile mammography unit offered free screenings to patients at 62nd Street and Cedar Avenue, outside the Church of Christian Compassion. The effort is a way to ease access to state-of-the-art breast cancer screening technology in hopes of reaching patients who missed screenings the past few years — or never got their first mammogram — due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
See more in the NBC10 storyStories from NBC 10 and CBS3 Philadelphia highlighted the free screenings, an initiative in partnership between Penn Medicine and West Philadelphia community organizations.
It’s especially important to expand screenings to Black patients, who are diagnosed with breast cancer at higher rates than white patients, and may have more difficulty getting screened and treated. Penn Medicine radiologist Linda Nunes, MD, who also serves as Radiology’s vice chair for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity in Radiology, told CBS 3, “This ability for people to get screened right in their community, where they feel comfortable, where it’s easy for them to access it, it’s just an opportunity to make up for all that disparity.”