Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer

Helping Families Communicate About Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer: Family Medicine Residency Training Program Learning Collaborative

FMEC is conducting a learning collaborative of family medicine residency training programs focused on the CDC’s Bring Your Brave campaign and using stories to discuss hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. Residency program leadership will use narrative medicine to integrate the Bring Your Brave materials in training and practice, create measures of success for their integration into training, and develop ancillary tools and strategies to complement the CDC’s existing tools that will encourage other medical schools and residency training to use them.

About Bring Your Brave

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States. While breast cancer mostly occurs among older women, in rare cases breast cancer does affect women under the age of 45. Nine percent of all cases of breast cancer in the U.S. are reported in this age group. Risk for breast cancer among young women varies based on factors such as family and personal history of cancer. Many young women do not know their risk for this disease or are not aware of ways to lower their risk.

Understanding cancer risk factors and being proactive may help women lower their risk for getting breast or ovarian cancer at a young age, or lead to detection at an early stage when treatment works best.

The Bring Your Brave campaign provides information about breast cancer to women younger than age 45 by sharing real stories about young women whose lives have been affected by breast cancer.

For more information, visit the Bring Your Brave Campaign’s resources for healthcare provider education, and integrate the many women’s stories presented by the campaign, which can be shared with providers and patients via videos, podcasts and handouts.

Learning Collaborative Advisory Committee

  • Tracey Conti, MD, Chair, Department of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC
  • Philip G. Day, Ph.D., Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Education, Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, UMass Medical School
  • Susanna Evans, MD, Associate Professor and Chair, Family, Community, and Preventive Medicine, Temple Health Chestnut Hill, Drexel University College of Medicine
  • Adam E. Perrin, MD, Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Faculty Co-Director, Student Affairs, UConn School of Medicine
  • Sarah Inés Ramírez, MD, Assistant Professor, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Penn State Health

Participating Residencies

Get involved

The project provides an opportunity for faculty who are passionate about narrative medicine, hereditary cancers in women, and health equity to shape a new initiative that will be shared with training programs nationally. Family medicine training programs in the northeast U.S. who want to participate in the project should contact Rebecca Bouck at [email protected].

Thank you to our funders

The FMEC’s project, Helping Families Communicate about Hereditary Breast or Ovarian Cancer, is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) (Grant/Cooperative Agreement Number 5-NU38OT000286-05).