Health: Fred Hutch provides phone service

Under contract with the National Cancer Institute, Fred Hutch provides a service vital to people see

By Sally James December 31, 1969

This article originally appeared in the November 2010 issue of Seattle magazine.

Special Calling
Under contract with the National Cancer Institute, Fred Hutch provides a service vital to people seeking communication and compassion
.

The calls come in from anywhere and everywhere, landing in a quiet warren of cubicles inside a South Lake Union building. “I just found out I have Stage 4 cancer in my throat,” drawls a voice that drips Texas. “I need to get all my teeth removed.”

Callers dial 1.800.4CANCER (1.800.422.6237) by the hundreds every day, and likely don’t know they’re reaching a call center in Seattle. In January, the National Cancer Institute awarded a multiyear contract to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to administer its Cancer Information Service (CIS) Contact Center. The program operates from the Fred Hutch campus (calls are answered every weekday from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time) and serves the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the U.S.–associated Pacific territories.

Center manager Dawn Sittauer, who used to be one of the roughly 80 counselors answering the phones, describes the mixture of hope and fear that pervades these conversations. Often, she says, it’s not the cancer patient who calls. It’s a loved one. “They can ask a question of us that they can’t ask in front of the patient,” Sittauer explains. “For example: ‘Is my husband going to die?’” Last July alone, the service handled almost 6,000 calls, about 500 of them in Spanish. (CIS also provides live chat services at cancer.gov/livechat until 8 p.m. Pacific time, and responds to e-mail inquiries at cancergovstaff@mail.nih.gov.)

The nonprofit American Cancer Society (cancer.org) runs a similar operation in Austin, Texas, and estimates that it gets 1 million calls per year. A third large program is Cancer Care (cancercare.org), with decades of experience supporting patients and families. A common denominator among all these callers is economic anxiety. According to a 2006 survey bythe Kaiser Family Foundation, 25 percent of American families with a cancer patient used up all of their savings to pay for treatment. So part of the mission of a federal program like CIS is to ensure that people know about government-funded research and clinical trials. CIS counselors can match callers to trials that may be seeking participants, who can take part in research programs at no cost. These trials touch on all aspects of cancer—from prevention and early detection to treatment and supportive care—and occur at institutions all around the country, including Fred Hutch. Counselors also can help identify pharmaceutical companies that may provide medicine free or at reduced cost.

Of course, CIS counselors don’t have all of the fiscal answers, nor can they make diagnoses. What they do have is time. In many cases, callers have already talked to doctors, but it takes a while for the complexity of a cancer diagnosis to sink in. Interacting with the CIS counselors, who are trained to explain medical information and do not have any time limits placed on the calls they answer, allows patients and families to process information thoughtfully, and to straighten out any confusion. “We have calls that last an hour,” says center director Nancy Zbaren.

Information specialists are not required to be nurses or therapists, although some have master’s degrees or public health experience. They receive five weeks of training in how to gently question callers and then find the appropriate information about diagnosis, treatment choices and factors regarding hundreds of cancers from a variety of medic

 

Follow Us

Seattle: Again The Place To Be

Seattle: Again The Place To Be

Seattle nears pre-pandemic visitor levels in impressive turnaround

Visit Seattle released preliminary figures for 2023 at its annual meeting Wednesday, and found that the region hosted 37.8 million visitors last year, an 8.9% increase from 2022. That’s just 10% less than in 2019, the last full year before the pandemic.

Foot Traffic Rises Again in Downtown Seattle

Foot Traffic Rises Again in Downtown Seattle

Downtown Seattle Association: Slow recovery continues

Nearly 1.9 million visitors came downtown last month. Downtown averaged 85,000 daily workers, a 16% increase from February 2023. That, however, is only 57% compared to the same period in 2020, right before the pandemic.

Cream of the Chop: Top Chef Kaleena Bliss

Cream of the Chop: Top Chef Kaleena Bliss

Washington native competes on popular Bravo cooking competition

Seattleites will spot a familiar face on the latest season of Top Chef, set in Wisconsin this year. Chef Kaleena Bliss competes for the coveted title on the longstanding cooking competition franchise, now in its 21st year.

Washington’s Woeful Gender-Pay Gap

Washington’s Woeful Gender-Pay Gap

Women across the state earn significantly less than men

Women across the state made $18,4000 less in average wages than men in 2022. New research from the National Partnership for Women and Families found that only Utah has a larger discrepancy, at $20,649.