Thread by @DrewMoghanaki

In 2006, a radiation oncologist in Inglewood, California, published a report on building a Lay Patient Navigator Program in collaboration with the @RANDCorporation. #radonc 1/ 🧵acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.10…

2/ The focus of this report was to describe how people with cancer who are not as privileged as those living in other areas of Los Angeles might benefit from lay patient navigators.

3/ At the time, it was still an innovative concept to engage lay patient navigators to support people with cancer. Nonetheless, it made a lot of sense to study it.

4/ It was hypothesized there would be benefits to hiring non-healthcare workers to help people living in South Central and Southwestern Los Angeles. Seems like common sense to me.

5/ Input from the community was (appropriately) sought after and helped the program succeed.

6/ This 2006 report is truly inspiring in how much interest the program created in the community and how rare it was for lay patient navigators to lose interest in the opportunity to help.

7/ In good news, buy-in from patients in this part of Los Angeles to work with lay patient navigators was great.

8/ With support from @theNCI, lay patient navigators were also trained to recruit patients for clinical trial enrollment. The navigators soon learned that their involvement wouldn't be a panacea, but it was discovered they could certainly help.

9/ For those who don't know the lead author, he soon became the Chair of Radiation Oncology at UCLA, later became @ASTRO_org president, and eventually received the ASTRO Gold Medal in 2017. You can learn more about his career here: uclahealth.org/providers/mich…

10/ If you want to learn more about him, you can get to know him better on a personal level by reading this interview here: astro.org/About-ASTRO/Hi…

11/ Now, if everyone can refrain from informing him that I highlighted his work on Twitter, that would be great. That includes you, @NehaVapiwala and @ldawsonmd. Thank you. 😀