Grants for Cancer Care
Two grants to Dartmouth Medical School to improve cancer care by using new concepts of training and to develop multi-disciplinary treatment teams have been announced by Dean Carleton B. Chapman.
One for $44,000 annually for three years is from the Tri-States Regional Medical Program to fund the new Northern New England Cancer Project. The other, from the National Cancer Institute, will provide $50,619 for each of three years for clinical training.
The New England cancer project, designed to make physicians in general practice more, aware of cancer problems, will use pre-planned standards or guidelines developed cooperatively by Dartmouth Medical Center and community hospital physicians. It is an outgrowth of a similar local project begun in 1966 and now completed. A continuing education effort aimed at reducing cancer mortality, which is abnormally high in Vermont and New Hampshire, the program will include continuous monitoring of the guidelines and the application of new information gained from research centers to provide local physicians with the best therapy for their patients and an opportunity to compare results with others using alternate forms of therapy.
The program will also make available to area practitioners cancer care information through a telephone information and consultation office manned daily by a cancer specialist.
The National Cancer Institute grant will provide cancer education for personnel at the Medical School, including faculty, students, interns, residents, and nurses. The main focus of the grant, according to Dr. Herbert L. Maurer, Medical School cancer coordinator and director of the project, will be "the continued development and testing of pre-planned and multi-disciplinary guidelines for cancer diagnosis and treatment."
The importance of Hanover as a center for the treatment and study of cancer was greatly increased last year with the establishment of the nation's second regional cancer treatment center at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. With a $3 million grant from Congress, construction is now going forward on a new building which will be equipped with a 45-million-volt Brown Boveri Betatron, the third such radiation therapy unit in the world.
