The Copper Queen Community Hospital will honor the Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Foundation at 10 a.m., Friday, March 19, for one of the facility’s largest private donations ever received. The $100,000 grant will be used to develop Women’s Wellness Services, announced Jim Dickson, Hospital CEO.

“We are 25 to 30 miles from the next available women’s wellness providers, and prospective patients are scattered over a rural landscape, in sparsely populated areas, in many cases served by secondary roads. Providing easy access to potentially life-saving technology is key,” Dickson said. “The goal of our Women’s Wellness Services is to provide the best education and technology for early detection and risk assessment for all women in this geographic region. It is our hope to improve women’s survival rates. There is a great disparity of survival rates for women who have cancer in rural areas as compared to their urban counterparts”

 Women in rural areas face a number of challenges when it comes to maintaining quality health, Dickson said. These challenges include higher rates of undiagnosed heart disease and cancer, as well as chronic illnesses, such as diabetes and high blood pressure, because of a lack of health insurance or being underinsured

One third of American women fail to have regular mammogram screenings, and as a result, breast cancer is one of the leading killers of women in Arizona. For rural women that means an even higher mortality rate from breast cancer because they don’t have access to affordable mammogram screenings.

Copper Queen Community Hospital hopes to change that, Dickson said, adding “That’s why we intend to make wellness education and affordable mammography screenings available to all women in rural Cochise County.

The hospital’s diagnostic services will be one of first pieces of the Women’s Wellness Services to be supported through the Freeport-McMoRan grant. The addition of a permanent digital mammography unit will offer a “soft “ mammogram that is more comfortable and at a lower radiation than traditional screenings.

In addition, the Copper Queen’s Women’s Wellness Services are enhanced by mobile diagnostics at the  Douglas and Palominas clinics through a new mobile DeXA bone density scanner and digital-mammography screening device. The DeXA test (Dual-Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry) is the industry standard, providing a safe and non-invasive use of x-ray technology to measure bone mineral loss. The mammography and DeXA screenings are read by Dr. Steven Walsh and Dr. David Klein of Sierra Vista Diagnostics.