Alexandra Quinn on the Importance of Sustaining the Role of Community Health Workers in Cancer Care

Alexandra Quinn, chief executive officer, Health Leads, discusses the growing role of community health workers in cancer care and why it's important to make the work they do more sustainable.

Transcript

What role do community health workers play in cancer care?

What’s been interesting about the past year is just the rise in a team-based approach and additions to the team like community health workers and patient navigators and health advocates, and whether it be a pediatric population or a complex care population, they have a huge role to play in helping a patient navigate a pretty complicated set of circumstances.

At Health Leads, we think less about how do we best utilize but how do we best sustain the role, because often with the community health workers we work with, they’re actually also from the community, so how do you think about things like what’s the financial and structural pieces we need to put in place so that they can actually sustain their job too?