Michele McCourt Explains CancerCare's Role in Supporting Patients

Beyond helping with co-payment assistance for patients with cancer, CancerCare helps with practical and emotional supports for patients, explained Michele McCourt, senior director of the CancerCare Co-Payment Assistance Foundation.

Transcript

Beyond financial help, how does CancerCare provide assistance to patients with cancer?

CancerCare is an organization that has been around since 1944. We help with the practical and emotional support that all cancer patients need and even anyone that is affected by the cancer diagnosis. We help with counseling services, we have face-to-face counseling, online counseling, telephone counseling, that we provide free of charge. We also have a lot of educational programs that are provided free-of-charge to the patients and to the providers about different topics. So, it could be about new treatments coming for a specific disease type. It could be about managing the costs of your treatments. Really any topic.

We also provide other financial assistance, non-copayment assistance, which is assistance for transportation because patients with cancer, aside from all these other costs related to diagnosis, they have to go for treatment, maybe it’s once a week, maybe it’s three times a week, if there’s loss of wages because they aren’t able to work full time anymore. Again, we try to help with those practical needs. Transportation, child care, home care, if we could help with a utility bill, we will do that.