Courtesy of Methodist Health System
While food trucks have jacked-up the convenience of eating out, the restaurant industry isn’t the only trade benefiting from storefront to wheels success. Health care has put its services on the road with mobile mammograms.
Methodist Health System, along with UT Southwestern Medical Center and Parkland Hospital, has a mobile mammography unit that travels to various businesses, community centers, churches, clinics and schools throughout Dallas, including a recent visit to Southern Methodist University on Nov. 18.
In a short 15-minute appointment, patients receive a screening mammogram identical to one at a hospital. Contrary to a hospital visit though, there are no doctors or nurses aboard. A registration coordinator and mammography technician operate the unit.
The mobile unit adds a convenience factor to mammograms, especially when it is sits in an employer’s parking lot. Two of most frequent stops for the unit are businesses and schools.
“We allow them to get their screening mammograms done at their jobs so they don’t have to take off of work,” Charla Gauthier, supervisor of Methodist Dallas Cancer Services, said.
Gauthier, a working mother, is able to sympathize with many of the unit’s patients. If she didn’t work at a hospital she would not be able to get her annual mammogram, unless she scheduled time off work. She was quick to add that isn’t a feasible luxury for everyone.
But health professionals are not the only ones to see the benefits of bringing medical services directly to patients.
“It’s definitely something I would consider just cause of the convenience factor,” SMU senior Molly Oas said in response to getting a future mammogram on a mobile unit. Oas plans to enter the work force in May 2012 and added, “It’s hard to justify taking a whole day off of work just to do that. A lot of offices, depending on where you are, aren’t opened on the weekends, they don’t have extended