President and founder of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention in New York, Dr Harold Freeman, will be this year’s guest speaker at the Jamaica Cancer Society’s annual benefit dinner on Saturday.

Freeman, is also senior advisor to the director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) based in Bethesda, Maryland, and was founding director of the NCI Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities.

He also served as national president of the American Cancer Society (ACS) for a year, and is the chief architect of the ACS’ initiative on Cancer in the Poor as well as a leading authority on the interrelationships between race, poverty and cancer. The ACS established the Harold P Freeman Award, which is presented throughout the United States to persons who have made outstanding contributions to the fight against cancer in the poor.

Freeman pioneered the ‘Patient Navigation Programme’, which addresses disparities in access to treatment, particularly among poor and uninsured people. The programme is designed to assist medically underserved patients in navigating their way through a complex health system by overcoming barriers to timely diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

A professor of Clinical Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Freeman worked as Director of Surgery at the Harlem Hospital in New York for 25 years. He also served as president and CEO of North General Hospital in New York.

A diplomat of the American Board of Surgery and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Freeman has been a medical doctor of the Breast Examination Center of Harlem, a programme of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center since 1979.

Dr John Kelly, a past chairman of the American Cancer Society, who contributed to the introduction of Relay for Life in Jamaica, will also be a special guest at the event. Relay for Life is an annual fund-raising event put on by the JCS to support its activities of education, screening and counselling.