Community-based prostate-cancer screening program teams up with barbershops
Waverly Willis was out shopping with his daughter one day when he was blindsided—by a hug. A big, tearful, holding-on-for-dear-life hug, the kind that’s usually reserved for long-distance airport arrivals and the sidelines of the Super Bowl. Willis wondered: Who is this woman? And why is she hugging me?
Once she pulled away, he got his answer: “I’m Terry’s wife,” she explained. “I don’t know what you all did to get him to get on that bus, but you got him—and my husband’s going to be alright.”
Now Willis understood. Terry Williams was a regular at his Urban Kutz Barbershop in Cleveland. And “the bus” was a mobile unit that had recently rolled up as part of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Cleveland African American Prostate Cancer Project’s effort to encourage Black men age 40 and older to get screened. Along with barbers at more than a dozen area shops, Willis had been nudging clients, Williams among them, to come get tested.
The project is one of many education and outreach programs the cancer center has launched with community partners to prevent, diagnose and treat cancers across Cleveland and the 15 surrounding counties.
At Urban Kutz, many clients were nervous the screening would be invasive. Willis and his barbers reassured them: It’s just a blood test. Some, anxious about the results, figured it was better not to know. Willis, a cancer survivor himself, was a living rebuttal. And many had never been referred for screening, despite being up-to-date on their primary care check-ups.
That’s not surprising, said Erika Trapl, associate director for community outreach and engagement at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. Although Black men are at higher risk of prostate cancer both locally and across the country, the latest national guidelines for prostate cancer screening don’t take race into account. And busy primary care doctors don’t always have time for a thoughtful conversation about the pros and cons of screening, said Trapl (CWR ’00; GRS ’04, ’07, epidemiology and biostatistics), also a professor in the CWRU School of Medicine’s Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences.