December 05, 2022
3 min read
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Kobetz reports no relevant financial disclosures.
The Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of the University of Miami Health System, has launched the Firefighter Cancer Initiative mobile health clinic for the prevention and detection of cancer in the firefighter population.
The state-of-the art mobile clinic, now entering its second year, was created to address the increased cancer rates among the firefighter population and provide more convenient access to cancer prevention and education resources for first responders, according to a press release.
“Our firefighters are citizen-scientists — they tell us what research questions to ask and how to operationalize our findings into solutions such as this vehicle,” Erin Kobetz, PhD, MPH, associate director of population sciences and cancer disparity at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, John K. and Judy H. Schulte Senior Endowed Chair in Cancer Research, and vice provost for research and scholarship at the University of Miami, said in the release.
Kobetz spoke with Healio about the mobile clinic, why it is needed and her ultimate hope for the initiative.
Healio: Why is a mobile clinic needed for this specific population?
Kobe: Firefighters’ work occurs in shifts with long hours, precluding ready access to physicians and other health care providers. Couple this barrier with the fact that many firefighters have a second job on their days off from their role as a firefighter, which further constrains their ability to easily engage with the formal health care system for management of chronic conditions or emergent health needs. Given our collaborative science for nearly the past decade, our firefighter partners felt there was a benefit for us to be the ones providing the clinical care and challenged us to think about how to deliver it in a way that made sense, taking into consideration the challenges to routine health care access.
Healio: What does the mobile clinic entail?
Kobe: The mobile clinic is led by a multidisciplinary team of scientists, health care practitioners and occupational health and safety experts that travel from fire station to fire station, and ultimately will travel throughout the tri-county South Florida area to provide comprehensive health exams, cancer screenings , education and resources on how to mitigate occupational health risks while at work. It will supplement brick-and-mortar clinics located in downtown Miami, Coral Gables, and Plantation, FL.
Healio: Do you plan to utilize the data gleaned from the mobile clinic for ongoing research in this population?
Kobe: The vehicle also brings research to the fire stations and offers an opportunity to participate in ongoing science. We may eventually use the clinical data for research too, although that’s not a top focus right now. We are more interested in understanding how to best utilize the vehicle to meet the needs of our first responders and advance our shared goal of increasing prevention and early detection of cancer.
Healio: How did you become involved in this initiative?
Kobe: Palm Beach County firefighters initially reached out to me when trying to understand why their colleagues were dying of early-onset aggressive cancers. In response, I organized a team of interdisciplinary scientists from the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and then facilitated meaningful collaboration with these firefighters and ultimately others across Florida to understand how we could structure research that was mutually beneficial.
Healio: What is the ultimate hope for this mobile screening and education initiative?
Kobe: Ideally, this approach would be scaled and reproduced to extend the reach of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and our Firefighter Cancer Initiative beyond the boundaries of South Florida. We can share our standard operating procedures and our clinical services with firefighters elsewhere and with other NCI-designated cancer centers who similarly work with firefighters on some aspect of understanding and attenuating their excess risk for cancer. Firefighting is a class one carcinogen for cancer, and this should be taken into account when health professionals interact with firefighters for primary and/or preventive care. For oncologists, it is important to know that the side effects for many chemotherapies can affect a firefighter’s ability to return to work in the field and this should likely be discussed at the outset of treatment. Doing so is essential for achieving optimal survivorship and quality of life.
Erin Kobetz, PhD, MPH, can be reached at [email protected].
