Hoops for Hope is a Slam Dunk for Rural Women's Health

It's been just 60 days since two small hospitals in rural Kansas teamed up to host a successful celebrity basketball game, which raised $40,000 for women's cancer prevention.

But the event was more than just a sold-out game.

The event itself became a vehicle to educate and energize health awareness in an area troubled by the economic recession and poor access to care.

Because of the game, and the money raised, five small towns (total population 2,500) will have mobile digital mammography, in a Winnebago, starting in February. Women will have access to colonoscopies through a program provided by Pratt Regional Medical Center, which is 90 miles away.

So, in the spirit of the end of the year and the holidays, I asked the CEO of one of the hospitals, Benjamin Anderson of 24-bed Ashland Health Center, to dissect why the event worked so well so other rural health officials might try a similar event.

But first let's explain what happened. The idea to put on a celebrity game sprung from the imagination of Joe LaBelle, a 21-year-old dishwasher in the Ashland hospital kitchen, Anderson says.

Through fate, LaBelle happened to share a car ride with Anderson. LaBelle had been attending services for his grandmother, who had just died of breast cancer that was caught too late. And he was fresh with regret, and "what ifs" what if a mammogram had caught his grandmother's lump in time.

Anderson says women delay mammography in their rural areas. "Women are driving an hour to get a mammogram, and many drive 2.5 hours to Wichita for a digital mammogram," he says. Another impediment is the cost, $100 to $150 for a mammogram, plus loss of a day's pay to make the drive, plus costs of gasoline.

"The expense can amount to several hundred dollars. So often, women just don't get them," Anderson explains.

Members of the community started to join in the discussions, which noted that women's health is critically important to the health of entire families.

"Women make up 80% of the healthcare decisions for their families, but when they're managing health not just for themselves, but often both sets of parents and grandparents, mom tends to neglect her own," Anderson says. "So when mom comes down with stage 4 breast cancer, everyone else's health is affected too."

"When we educate and empower women to take responsibility for themselves, they bring along everyone else," Anderson says. "They even persuade men to undergo prostate exams."

Residents in the area formed a group called the WEPAC Alliance (named after the five towns in the area: Wilmore, Englewood, Protection, Ashland, and Coldwater) and just about everyone played an important role.

LaBelle suggested that the region's health providers, Ashland Health Center and 14-bed Comanche County Hospital in nearby Coldwater, team up to think about a basketball event.

Soon, celebrity players, including Jackie Stiles, the all-time leading scorer in NCAA women's basketball who grew up in a nearby small town, agreed to participate. So did star players from college teams in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Iowa. Fox Television kicked in, and advertisers paid for travel. About 138 sponsor names are listed on the Web site. There were about $30,000 in-kind contributions for uniforms, game basketballs, and many other material or advertising donations, and $40,000 in cash. A Jumbotron was brought in so people who couldn't buy tickets could watch the game in the Ashland High School football field. The Kansas State and University of Kansas cheerleaders volunteered too.

Writing about the event in Sports Illustrated Nov. 2, columnist Joe Posnanski described the tremendous spirit as like that depicted in the movie It's A Wonderful Life.

One amazing lesson, Anderson says, was the discovery that five communities that might compete and fight—especially because of the economic downturn that has taken so many businesses and jobs and sometimes pitted communities against each other—"dropped their walls, locked arms, and found a way to work together."

Tickets were sold for $30 and the 1,000 seats in the Ashland gymnasium were sold out in just a few hours, Anderson says.

Next year, he adds, the coordinating committee will market more aggressively outside their communities to sell more tickets and bring in more resources. And there will be an effort to televise the game nationally, perhaps to sell more tickets to people from out of town who come to watch.

"We had people coming from North Dakota; Austin, TX; Springfield, MO; Colorado; and Kansas City," Anderson says.

And of course one of the best outcomes from the entire experience is a new appreciation among women in these communities of the importance of prevention screening.

What lessons learned would he like to share with other hospital officials who might like to duplicate the effort? One of the most important, he says, is something administrators like him should understand: "The best ideas don't come from administration. They come from people like a dishwasher in our kitchen, Joe LaBelle."