This Sunday, researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida declared that they started a new program that aims to find ways to overcome barriers of delivering patient care to financially disadvantaged, medically uninsured women.

Although there are numerous programs across the United States providing free breast cancer screening, there is no unified system to give also diagnostic services when an abnormality is found.

Uninsured women raise problems as they don’t have a telephone or permanent address, not even a temporary one. In addition, many of them don’t have a car and most of the clinics are not accessible by public transportation.

The Mayo Breast Clinic intends to address the transportation issue by asking Jacksonville city official for bus service to the clinic.
The Mayo Clinic conducted a study working with health departments in four counties around the clinic that referred women with abnormal mammograms. There were 447 women referred through 2006 with a mean age of almost 50 years.

90 percent of detected abnormalities were benign and 38 cancers were diagnosed. During this study the Mayo Clinic succeeded to down the treatment time from several months delay to 36 days, less than 60 days as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established as maximum amount of time to begin treatment for cancer.