In the late 19th Century, the New York Highlanders played baseball in Washington Heights. Soon after the New York team acquired Babe Ruth from Boston, they built Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center campus of New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) was built on the site of the original stadium. It is fitting then that NYPH continues to have strong connections to baseball through its affiliation with the Bassett Healthcare System in Cooperstown, N.Y., best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

The Bassett Healthcare Regional Cancer Program today provides an integrated multidisciplinary approach to cancer care for the residents of Otsego County and seven surrounding counties. Based out of the Louis Busch Hager Cancer Center in Cooperstown, the program provides full oncologic services at sites in Oneonta and Herkimer, approximately 30 miles to the south and north of Cooperstown, respectively. The Bassett Healthcare System includes two hospitals and over 20 primary care clinics throughout the region, with chemotherapy services available at three of those sites. This Cancer Program oversees the cancer care of this medically underserved rural population and has worked to bring more attention to cancer screening and prevention.

In 2000, the Cancer Program was reorganized with the hiring of Dr. Maureen Killackey as Medical Director and Clifford Buell as Administrative Director. In late 2001, Peggy Hoskins, a registered nurse and physician assistant with extensive experience in the Cancer Program, was appointed as the Prevention and Early Detection Coordinator to help organize programs for early detection and prevention and to expand community and professional education efforts. Ms. Hoskins was charged with decreasing cancer morbidity and mortality by offering information and screening services to the local population and their physicians.

In her first six months, Ms. Hoskins helped to organize educational events and free screenings in connection with nationally recognized “months” for cervical, colorectal, and skin cancers. Area newspapers reported on these events, which were coordinated with groups such as the American Cancer Society, Gynecologic Cancer Foundation, American Gastroenterological Association, American Dermatologic Association, and the National Cancer Institute. In addition, Ms. Hoskins helped develop collaborative relationships with county health departments and other groups, such as the Delaware County Cancer Coalition, part of the Northern Appalachian Leadership Initiative on Cancer. These events have reached 175 health care providers; skin cancer screening clinics, for example, have yielded a referral rate of 30 percent and one diagnosis of early stage melanoma.

Other initiatives include information booths at county fairs, which are important social events in the rural farming community. Many poor and uninsured, the most at-risk segment of the region’s population, attend these events. The effectiveness of this approach will be evaluated in early September. Additional events this fall will highlight prostate cancer, gynecologic cancer, breast cancer, and lung cancer.

The activities developed by the Prevention and Early Detection Coordinator are new to the Bassett Healthcare System, but they represent extensions of past prevention and early detection activities. For example, the Bassett Healthcare System is one of five sites for the New York State Department of Health’s Mobile Mammography Initiative. Since its inception in 1997, the mobile unit has screened over 5000 women. The Bassett System also participates in the breast and cervical cancer screening program, known locally as Healthy Living Partnerships, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Each year, 500 local women are screened as part of this program. Breast cancer awareness, screening, and educational activities are overseen by the Breast Care Coordinator, another new position in the Cancer Program.

The Cancer Program has also been involved in national studies of cancer prevention, including the Breast Cancer Prevention Trial (BCPT), the STAR trial (breast cancer), the SELECT trial (prostate cancer), and cooperative group studies looking at lung cancer and colorectal cancer. Bassett Healthcare accrued the most patients of any site in New York State for the BCPT study, and currently has 43 patients enrolled in STAR and 42 in SELECT.

It has been decades since the National Baseball Hall of Fame opened with its original five baseball superstars (Can you name them?*). Our goal is to get the Bassett Healthcare System into the Hall of Fame of cancer prevention and control. Our new team, working with our colleagues at NYPH, will get us there soon.

* That inaugural class was Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner