Fall 2024 Newsletter

Highlights from the 2024 Fall Meeting

The 2024 Cancer Coalition Fall Meeting, held Oct. 9 in Mitchell, brought together healthcare professionals, advocates, and coalition partners from across the state to tackle key cancer challenges.

With a full day of presentations, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities, the event highlighted the collective progress being made in cancer screening, prevention, treatment, and survivorship in South Dakota.

Check out all the photos and presentation materials from this year's meeting as well as archived info from previous years on the Cancer Coalition website.

Fall Meeting attendees: Have you completed the meeting evaluation?

New Task Forces Announced

Each year, the Cancer Coalition reevaluates the priority areas within the SD Cancer Plan to direct the work of Coalition task forces and committees.

For 2024-2025, two task forces will continue their work from last year on improving HPV vaccination rates and early detection/health equity. The third task force is new for this year, promoting quality care and patient support services.

As part of its work to achieve objectives within Priority 11 within the SD Cancer Plan, the Patient Support & Quality of Care task force will include a workgroup on childhood cancer survivorship.

Coalition partners are encouraged to be involved with at least one task force or committee.

Task forces will meet starting in early December, then plan for January, March, May and July meetings with task force strategy workgroups meeting in the interim months.

Let's Get Started!

This year, you can help kickstart the brainstorming portion of the annual action planning process by:

Choosing your task force(s) and
Proposing some task force activities by Oct. 31 via this quick 3-question survey.

You'll be added to the task force(s) and your submitted ideas will be compiled into a virtual whiteboard to help guide discussions for our initial meetings. Keep an eye out for a welcome email!

Task Force Selection

Already chosen a task force?

Help pick a first meeting date/time:

HPV

Early Detection Health Equity

Patient Support & Quality of Care

Partner Poll

Where do you think the Fall Meeting should be held in 2025? (Choose potential location below)

East River SD (Mitchell, Sioux Falls)

Central SD (Chamberlain, Pierre)

Black Hills (Rapid City)

Partner Press

Cancer News from South Dakota

(From left) Megan Myers, SD Cancer Coalition Coordinator; Diane Inch, MPA-C; Caleb Nordquist, Cancer Screening Outreach Coordinator for the SD Comprehensive Cancer Control Program.

See more on the

Fall Meeting at

cancersd.com/fall-meeting

Fort Thompson PA Honored with Cancer Champion Award

The 2024 Cancer Coalition Cancer Champion Award, recognizing an individual who works to reduce cancer incidence and mortality while improving quality of life for cancer survivors, was awarded at the Fall Meeting on Oct. 9 in Mitchell to Diane Inch, MPA-C, of Horizon Health.

Inch is the physician assistant and sole provider at the Fort Thompson Community Health Clinic. According to her nomination, Inch provides care to many patients that do not have stable living conditions and has been able to leverage her clinic that has a good usable restroom to do on-demand fecal testing to screen for colorectal cancer.

She also has worked to help her clinic increase its CRC screening rate from a baseline of 35.66 percent to a 61 percent screening rate for the full 2023 calendar year - an impressive 25.26 percent increase.

Inch was nominated by Caleb Nordquist, Cancer Screening Outreach Coordinator for the Comprehensive Cancer Control Program and selected from a group of strong nominees by the Coalition Steering Committee.

Spotlight on Screening

Study: Some Women Avoid Breast Cancer Screening After False-Positive Results

Some women who receive a false-positive result on a mammogram may not come back for routine mammograms in the future, according to results from a large study.

False positives on a mammogram are apparent abnormalities that, after further evaluation, are found not to be cancer. But the additional testing needed to rule out cancer can be time-consuming, costly, and stressful. Follow-up tests, such as a biopsy of the breast, have risks of their own.

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 3.5 million mammograms from about 1 million women who were screened in the United States between 2005 and 2017.

Among women who had a true-negative result, 77 percent returned to routine screening in the following 30 months.

By contrast, 61 percent of women who had a false-positive result that required a repeat diagnostic mammogram in 6 months (a short-interval follow-up exam) returned to routine screening, as did 67 percent of women who required a biopsy.

Full Article

More Screening News:

AJMC: Preference for CRC testing associated with anticipated decision regret, medical maximizing

AMA: Another form of mammography for breast-cancer detection

Healio: Revised criteria may ‘substantially reduce racial disparities’ in lung cancer screening

Register Today for CRC Collaborative Session

The South Dakota Colorectal Cancer Control Program and the Cancer Coalition are pleased to offer a learning collaborative session focused on colorectal cancer screening.

The web inar, "Increasing Procedure Access with Stool-Based Tests for Average Risk Patients Who are Scheduled for a Colorectal Cancer Screening Colonoscopy" will be held at noon Central Dec. 5.

Presenting will be Jennifer Weiss, BS, Senior Quality Strategist at Sanford Health, and Delayne Severson, Quality Improvement Advisor at Sanford Health.

Get Monthly Coalition Email Updates!

The Cancer Coalition newsletter is delivered quarterly to those who have opted to be included on our Coalition email list.

Active Coalition partners also receive a monthly updates email with Coalition events/activities, resources, and local, regional and national cancer news of note.

Want to be added to our monthly list? Contact Megan Myers.

Upcoming Events & Webinars

Want to help plan upcoming Cancer Coalition events such as the Summer Social and the annual Fall Meeting? We're looking for committee members interested in membership and marketing! Contact Megan Myers for more info.

American Lung Association: Respiratory Virus Immunizations for Adults with Chronic Medical Conditions

October 30

Webinar

Iowa Cancer Consortium: Lung Cancer Screening Learning Collaborative Series

November 1 & 18

Hybrid

Message Lab: Why Referring Clinicians Hesitate To Consult Palliative Care and What We Should Do Differently

November 6

Webinar

Indiana Cancer Consortium: HPV and Tobacco Education for Dental Providers

November 13

Webinar

Avera Cancer Institute: Time of Remembrance

November 14

5 pm CT

Prairie Center, Sioux Falls

Great American Smokeout

November 21

More Info

Keep Us in the Loop!

Is your organization doing work that supports the priorities of the 2021-2025 South Dakota Cancer Plan?

Take a minute to share the great work you’re doing outside of Cancer Coalition efforts by submitting your Cancer Plan Activities online.

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Funding for this publication was made possible (in part) by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. The views expressed in written materials or publications do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services, nor does the mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.