Teche Action adds Cancer Support

By: Howard J. Castay, Jr.

Free help ranging from financial support to medical supplies and equipment is now available to St Mary Parish residents who are battling cancer, at Teche Action Clinic.

Miles Perret Cancer Services of Lafayette has launched an initiative – a travelling cancer bus service that will be in Franklin the second Wednesday of every month from 1 to 3 p.m., parked at the clinic’s headquarters, 1115 Weber Street.

Perret Cancer Center Service Coordinator Tina Touchet said the mission of the bus, which his non-medical, is to “serve families in Acadiana fighting and surviving cancer, with care and compassion.”

The services are free and open to all, regardless of income. The program provides: free medicine; financial support in paying for a persons’ utilities; medical supplies and equipment; emotional support; cancer education; mastectomy items; wigs, hats, scarves and turbans; nutritional supplements; exercise programs, and a children’s program.

In addition to St. Mary, the bus will travel in Iberia, Vermillion, St. Martin, St. Landry, Lafayette, Jeff Davis, Evangeline, Cameron, Calcasieu, Avoyelles and Acadia parishes.

For more information on the Miles Perret Cancer Center and its services, Touchet said persons can visit their website at http://www.milesperretcenter.org/, or call 337-984-1920.

Teche Action Clinic CEO and CAO Dr. Gary Wiltz, M.D. welcomed the free services Wednesday afternoon with a ribbon cutting ceremony. “Our health care heroes at Teche Action Clinic work hard every day at providing people in the community a heath care home so they can stay healthy and out of hospitals. Now that we have been blessed to partner with the Miles Perret Center in Lafayette, we’re going to take our services to another level in health care,” Wiltz said.

In operation since 1974, Teche Action, a federally qualified health center, operates a school based clinic at West St. Mary High School in Baldwin, two other clinics in Terrebonne Parish, and one in St. John Parish, in Edgard. The clinics see patients on a sliding fee scale basis.

“The White House Office of Management and Budget has ranked health centers as one of the 10 most effective government programs – a designation earned by only six percent of all federal programs,” Wiltz said. “We save the United States health care system more than $17 billion a year by providing affordable, preventive health care to low-income, uninsured people who may rely on hospital emergency rooms as a source of care.”

Wiltz said $18 billion a year is wasted on avoidable visits to emergency rooms that could have been redirected to a health center. Also, he said health care centers were an initiative started by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to combat the war on poverty.