Trials, Tribulations of Recruiting Black Patients for Cancer Research
This Blog post represents a partnership between the Women in Medicine Summit and Healio Women in Oncology. An excerpt appears blow, and please find the full length piece at Healio’s Women in Oncology Blog
In the summer of 2021, I worked as a medical student researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Over the course of 8 weeks, I became embarrassingly familiar with the disparities of Black enrollment in cancer research.
My plan was to investigate barriers to cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic among Black women in a COVID-19 hotspot. Given known baseline differences in access, quality and outcomes, my research mentor and I wanted to assess barriers we presumed had been worsened by increased unemployment and delays in screenings and treatment among other consequences of the global pandemic.
Radio silence
To ensure robust enrollment in our survey-based study, I spent weeks reaching out to breast cancer forums on multiple websites, working to gain access to email listservs, joining Facebook groups that required administrator approval and contacting Black churches in Manhattan with pleas to add the survey link to their newsletter.
Understanding the potential hesitancy folks may have with sharing personal medical concerns, our recruitment materials highlighted survey anonymity and that it was led by a Black woman — me. I included a headshot of myself, as well as an explanation that understanding barriers could allow us to design programs to improve cancer care.
Despite exhaustive efforts to obtain survey responses, I was met with radio silence —only one-and-a-half responses.
As a Black woman who has experience collecting personal stories — I wrote a book detailing the stories of women with breast cancer in 2019 — I was bemused by the seeming inaccessibility of a group to which I belonged.
About the author: Sarah Marion is a third-year medical student at the University of Virginia Medical School. She wrote this blog post under the guidance of her mentor, Fumiko Chino, MD, radiation oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
