In this roundtable segment, Dr. Stacey Loeb of NYU Langone Health discuss how language and cultural differences affect genetic testing, clinical trial eligibility, and precision medicine access and what providers can do to deliver truly equitable cancer care for non-English-preferring patients.
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Transcript
Dr. Nicole Rochester:
Dr. Loeb, your population health work examines who gets what care and where. And as a bilingual physician, you intimately understand the language barriers, something that we haven’t yet talked about today. What strategies work for patient education across language and cultural differences?
Dr. Stacey Loeb:
Thank you for the question. I think this remains a big challenge. We actually just published a study showing, you know, less online information available about prostate cancer genetics in Spanish, for example. So, just recognizing, you know, many… Even comprehensive cancer centers only have their information available in English. And that presents a lot of barriers.
Published studies have shown, for example, that non-English preferring patients are less likely to receive genetic testing for prostate cancer, so this would, of course, then affect eligibility for clinical trials, eligibility for precision therapeutics, not to mention downstream impact for cancer risk for the patient and their family members. So, I think there’s a lot of work to be done in making sure we have more informational materials available in other languages.
Back to what Dr. Burnham discussed earlier, the critical importance of diversifying the workforce and also having staff in clinical settings who speak other languages and from different cultures who can help to narrow that gap with the patients. Unfortunately, we’re in the midst of a study right now about genetic testing, and there is very highly variable experience with third-party translation services. You know, some are excellent, but sometimes the translators themselves are not as comfortable with complicated cancer terminology or genetic terminology, so that can present a barrier as well.
So, I think this is definitely a work in progress to make sure that we’re able to provide the same high quality of care for our non-English preferring patients.
Dr. Nicole Rochester:
Absolutely, thank you. This is also important as we continue to strive to provide equitable care. You know, everyone deserves access to these groundbreaking therapies that you all have described.