Some might say the health care industry in Baton Rouge has never been more fluid.
In just the past two years, nursing shortages and crowded hospitals have led record numbers of health care workers to quit, longtime partnerships to break apart and new relationships to form.
On top of this, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the nature of health care while becoming the main priority for area hospitals for more than two years. However, with case numbers dropping, focus is returning to the disease that hospitals were spending much of their time on prior to the pandemic: cancer.
A revitalization of the Cancer Moonshot program may also be playing a role in the shift. Started in 2016 by then-Vice President Joe Biden, the now-reignited program aims to accomplish two goals: reduce the death rate of cancer by 50% over the next 25 years and improve the experience of patients and their families living with cancer.
Justin Brown, director of the Cancer Metabolism Program at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, says it’s exciting to see the two goals because they coincide with Pennington’s mission almost exactly. The center is currently preparing to launch cancer prevention studies and projects to help patients better navigate care.
COVID-19 wreaked havoc on cancer screening, Brown says. Screenings at many hospitals became elective or were postponed due to overcrowded hospitals and overwhelmed staff. People who missed their screenings were likely to continue putting the procedure off, he says, an issue that will have long-lasting consequences.
Already, there are more people being diagnosed with treatable cancers but that are further along, he says, because part of the screening process is identifying precancerous growths or identifying the disease in its earliest stages.
Read the full story from Business Report’s latest Trends in Health Care edition, which details how cancer care and prevention in the Baton Rouge area is changing. See the full magazine in a digital flipbook here.