Cathy Grant's Story

Cancer is an equal opportunity disease, and Moffitt Cancer Center naturally sees patients of every culture and background. Cathy Grant’s responsibility is ensuring Moffitt team members have the tools needed to provide every patient a good experience that results in an equitable health outcome. Her role emphasizes treating people with respect, and recognizing the impact of their different cultures, languages, economic or other circumstances on health outcomes.

Cathy’s own background was diverse, having worked in community outreach with mentoring programs for underserved youth, and in supplier diversity. “I’ve always had an interest in working to make sure that people have opportunities for success,” she says, “regardless of their background, culture or circumstance.”

Overall, her diversity efforts extend to Moffitt employees, patients, hospital suppliers and the surrounding community. This includes the Language Services team, which offers patients with limited English proficiency access to interpretation and translation in their preferred language.

Supplier Diversity ensures that Moffitt offers procurement opportunities for all businesses including those owned by women, minorities and veterans. Diversity & Inclusion efforts focus on educating team members about health disparities and strategies for fostering a respectful work environment. And her community outreach team, called M-POWER, “provides education on cancer prevention and healthy lifestyles to at-risk, under-served and low-income communities, particularly those impacted by health disparities,” she explains.

Cathy points to Moffitt’s leadership support of diversity and inclusion as one of many reasons she chose to come here. “Our team is encouraged to be creative, to step outside the box and do things that are life-changing,” she says. “We work really hard to make sure that we’re meeting the needs of the individuals in the community and to try to continually improve on what we do,” she adds.

In her role at Moffitt, Cathy sees courage in a very particular way: the willingness to have difficult but necessary conversations about cancer out in the community. “Culturally, topics of cancer are so difficult for people to address,” she says. “So our team members have to have great courage to go knocking on doors and saying, ‘Hey, let me tell you about how you can stay healthy by getting a mammogram every year,’ or talking to a group of gentlemen about prostate screening. That’s a level of courage that my team has to display each and every day.”