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Montrealers with trouble accessing a health-care provider are invited to visit a free cervical cancer screening clinic at the Herzl Family Practice Centre in the Jewish General Hospital on Nov. 27.
The clinic will be open from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will operate on a first-come, first-serve basis for 25- to 65-year-olds who haven’t had a Pap test in three years. The hope is to screen upward of 300 people.
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“This is a test that we’re offering to everybody, no matter their documentation status, their PR status … their RAMQ,” said Dr. Christian Chartier, one of the resident doctors involved in the effort.
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, 1,600 Canadian women will receive a cervical cancer diagnosis in 2024, 400 of whom will die. That’s why the early detection of abnormalities is essential via routine screening before symptoms develop, but that’s not always possible for people who don’t have access to a health-care professional, Chartier said.
“They don’t have anyone to do that for them,” he said. “And then maybe … they end up in the emergency with some sort of pelvic pain or pelvic symptoms, and then things are really past the point of no return.”
That’s why the centre is hosting a free screening day for the third year in a row, following the success of previous years.
“Most of our patients that we’ll see at the Pap test clinic will be asymptomatic young people who just want screening,” Chartier said. “The hope being that if you do enough of those tests across enough people, you end up catching the ‘bad ones,’ for lack of a better word, far before they become symptomatic and are often caught too late.”
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Chartier said there are about 55,000 “orphan patients” — people without family doctors — in the area served by the West-Central health authority.
He likened the cervical screening clinic to Quebec’s breast cancer screening program, which allows women to visit screening centres without referrals from doctors every two years in an effort to reduce breast cancer deaths in the province.
“The thinking here is to kind of do that for as many people on this one evening as we possibly can,” Chartier said. “We test them, and then we end up being accountable to their results, meaning something comes up, something’s wrong, something’s abnormal, that is our responsibility.”
Patients who would like to attend can accelerate the registration process by printing out a form and filling it out ahead of time.
The clinic is located inside the Jewish General Hospital at 5790 Côte-des-Neiges Rd., Pavilion H, second floor.
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