FINANCIAL TOXICITY & Removing Barriers to Entry
In addition to the psychosocial challenges faced by children with cancer, one the of the biggest challenges their families encounter is financial toxicity. Mounting medical bills, fuel and hotel costs from long trips and overnight stays at hospitals, maxed-out sick leave, vacation, and unpaid leave time – many parents struggle to get by financially during their children’s treatment.
While Team IMPACT cannot solve all these challenges, we can remove barriers to entry so that our unique therapeutic experience is never a burden and is accessible to all.
A COMMITMENT TO
ACCESS FOR ALL
Your investment will advance the efforts of Team IMPACT to ensure equality and inclusion in every aspect of our program.
We are making efforts toward advancing equity in the key areas described below.
Language
Over the past year we have made significant strides to break down language barriers, offering families that are solely Spanish-speaking the opportunity to participate in the program while maintaining same high-quality experience throughout every aspect. We’ve hired our first bilingual case manager and have incorporated multilingual accessibility into each of our outreach and programmatic components.
TRANSPORTATION
Approximatley 20% of our program participants have an average household income of less than $25,000. Impacted by the growing financial burdens of this moment, the need to address our transportation barrier is more present than ever. Many families in our program report that they do not have a functioning vehicle, or the primary caregiver at home does not have access the family’s one working car. Amidst critical doctors’ appointments, complicated school situations, and the obligations, many of these families are spending hours on public transportation each week to get to campus to see their Team IMPACT team. The transportation pilot was designed to provide safe and convenient transportation to families in need. Not only will Team IMPACT be able to serve our current population of families in a more efficient and meaningful way, it will also give us the opportunity to reach to more children suffering from the social isolation and emotional trauma that they experience each day.
DIVERSITY
At every level of our organization and within our program, we strive to be representative of the populations we serve. Because Team IMPACT serves so many different diagnoses, we’ve set our largest diagnosis group in the program (pediatric cancer) and the NCAA student-athlete population as our benchmarks for racial/ethnic representation. Key partnerships with healthcare institutions, like that with the CHOP Sickle Cell Center, allow us to expand our presence in more diverse disease communities. This partnership acts as a model for how Team IMPACT can be integrated into the hospital setting. By removing barriers, expanding access, and cultivating key partnerships, we continue to make progress toward this goal and are on pace to exceed these benchmarks by 2023.
STAFFING
No one understands the population of a community like a local resident. By funding increased local case managers with a focus on cancer and related blood disorders, we can better understand the population of the healthcare and athletic institutions we work with and those that we hope to expand our presence in. These individuals are key to integrating into the fabric of the local community and ensuring we are engaging a population that is representative of the local community at large.