MILWAUKEE -- Saving lives, one screening at a time —a local health center hosted a free health fair Wednesday, offering cancer screenings in a community that’s typically underserved when it comes to medical care.
“Why is there [a] beauty shop on every corner, a tavern on every corner, why is there not more medical facilities inside the inner city?” Patricia Hardy questioned.
When you step into one of the clinical rooms at the Lisbon Avenue Health Center, it looks like your average medical facility. It is, for the most part, except it houses something you can’t find anywhere else in 53208 zip code.
“I’m very passionate about this because it’s [we're] dying. Women of color are dying. 43%, that’s just a little bit off of 50, we should be enraged,” Hardy said.
The Lisbon Avenue Health Center has the only mammogram machine easily accessible to women living in this six-mile radius —Patricia Hardy, a six-year breast cancer survivor, said knowing this makes today’s health fair even more important.
But Hardy isn’t the only passionate one. Froedtert Health and Progressive Community Health Centers have teamed up to address inequality in cancer care too, providing free cancer screenings to men and women with or without insurance.
“I believe that a lot of women think that coming in and getting your breast smashed is something for them to be afraid of, but I have a lot of patients that come back to me every year, and send their friends back also,” Shante Dodd said.
Dodd, lead mammographer at the center said they're hosting this event because cancer prevention resources and screenings save lives —she also knows black people have the highest death rate of any racial group in the country for most cancers, and she’s working to combat that truth.
