REFLECTIONS FROM THE DIRECTOR –
In his own words
Edward Partridge, M. D., has been a visionary leader, a valued physician, and a community advocate throughout his longstanding, 48-year career at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. As the director of the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center for the past 10 years, he has led the center during rapid growth, launching numerous initiatives and programs. As he prepares to retire, he looks back over his time at UAB and shares his valuable insight.
Making an impact
Q: What do you consider your biggest accomplishments at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center? A: I demonstrated, I believe, convincingly that you can take lay people and train them to have significant impact in cancer care delivery across the entire continuum of care. We started with volunteer community health advisors who promoted breast and cervical cancer screening in the community. We trained a group of these health advisors to serve as navigators to help women who had a positive screening or cancer navigate the system, even though these women were from rural and under-resourced areas. We used navigators to improve accrual to clinical trials here at UAB. Lastly, we trained a group of navigators— all lay— to assist with treatment, survivorship, and end-of-life care for cancer patients with Medicare.
I think this will have a lasting impact because as we move from fee-for-service to value-based care delivery, our ability to extend the health care delivery system— keeping well people well and keeping sick people as well as possible and out of the hospital— is going to depend a great deal on our utilization of nontraditional health care delivery individuals. The potential is huge.
The other thing we did well was we took a relatively nascent cancer control and population science program and in 1992 made a conscious decision to focus our service and research in cancer disparities. As a result, we developed one of the premier cancer disparity research programs in the country.
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