Putting the Glam in Mammogram

The New York Times » Health by Stephanie Clifford - 49m ago Preview

 
 
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Clinics are trying to improve the experience to get women to show up for regular appointments.

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By Stephanie Clifford
June 6, 2019

When Shawna Peters, a cybersecurity recruiter in St. Paul, Minn., heard about a V.I.P. night including chair massages and goody bags with mints, lip balms and pedicure accessories, she signed right up. Nevermind that she’d have to get a mammogram to earn those perks.

Mammograms are such a literal pain — unless you are the kind of person who likes having her breast smashed against squeezing plates — that Ms. Peters, 44, said she always puts off getting one. “It’s like going to the dentist, having your teeth cleaned,” she said. But with the nearby Fairview clinic in Eagan, Minn., dangling extras, Ms. Peters ended up enjoying her appointment.

“The chair massage,” she said, “is just super icing on the cake.”

Fairview’s V.I.P. nights are part of a new strategy many medical clinics are undertaking to make mammograms more appealing. Sweetening appointments with beverage bars, warm robes and soothing sound baths puts a relaxed spin on the experience, and is also a way to sell the rest of a hospital’s offerings to women, who tend to be the medical decision makers in their families. Call it the dawning of the age of the “mammoglam.”

When Robert J. Min, the chairman of radiology at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, oversaw the opening of a new downtown Manhattan imaging location last year, he insisted that the space be bright and lively. Though it’s underground, he had designers put curtains over softly lit walls to mimic windows, and in the upstairs waiting room, potted orchids were placed on marble-topped tables. Where women wait once they have changed into hospital gowns, there’s dim, adjustable lighting, personal lockers, soothing music and a selection of robes and gowns that patients can use to cover up. (The gowns themselves also come in larger and smaller sizes for different bodies, rather than one unisex size.)


“Typically a lot of breast imaging facilities or OB-GYN facilities, there’s a lot of pastels,” Dr. Min said. “‘Water Lilies’ everywhere.” Instead, he went with a bold accent wall plastered with oversize purple flowers.