Cancer screening initiatives at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center are in line for a boost from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget that she presented Tuesday.
The executive budget proposes investing $4 million in Roswell Park to “finance new mobile breast and prostate cancer screening vans and expanded cancer screening activities,” according to the fiscal year 2025 executive budget briefing book.
Roswell Park officials were not immediately available to comment.
The Buffalo-based cancer center has a history of landing funding in state budgets to support screening initiatives and community outreach efforts. And meeting hard-to-reach patients in their own communities is an ongoing trend in health care the state has seemed eager to invest in.
Two years ago in the fiscal year 2023 budget, Roswell Park landed $4 million from the state for the procurement of a lung cancer screening mobile unit and associated medical technology. That budget also provided the cancer center with $2 million to establish a home base for its community outreach and engagement team.
Both of those investments have come to fruition.
The mobile lung cancer screening unit – called Eddy, for “Early Detection Driven to You” – hit Western New York streets in fall 2022 and started out by screening Buffalo firefighters. That unit’s goal is to increase access to lung cancer screening, particularly in underserved and high-risk communities. In New York, only 6% of those eligible for lung cancer screening get screened.
This past October, Roswell Park held a grand opening for its long-planned $4.7 million Roswell Park Community Outreach & Engagement Center, a 5,900-square-foot space that sits on a half-acre lot at 907 Michigan Ave. in the city’s Fruit Belt.
As a state public-benefit corporation, Roswell Park also receives operating support from the state.
Roswell Park, the only federally designated cancer center in upstate New York, received support from the…
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