Noelene Kotschan is the founder of Pink Drive, an NPC that has spent 18 years bringing free health screening to South African communities without access to hospitals. What began as breast cancer awareness has since grown into a fleet of mobile trucks offering mammography, Pap smears, HPV and PSA screening, skin and lung cancer checks, biopsies, and primary health screening.

Noelene explains how patient “navigators” — often cancer survivors themselves — follow up to ensure people actually get into the treatment system, sometimes arranging transport and accommodation for patients travelling hundreds of kilometres to hospital. She also describes how she and her team work alongside traditional healers and sangomas, who have become some of Pink Drive’s strongest advocates in communities that are often wary of outside agencies. She’s also candid about the heartbreak of late-stage diagnoses and the toll the work takes on her and everyone working with her.

Noelene closes with a hope to extend the model across Africa.

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Behind the Conversation

by Babette Gallard

The Part After the Diagnosis

I had assumed the remarkable part of PinkDrive was taking cancer screening to people who couldn’t easily reach it. But thanks to our interview, I quicly understood that screening is only the beginning.

I also found something striking about Noelene. She is enormously compassionate, but there is nothing vague or sentimental about the way she works. She talks about data, funding, logistics and accountability with the same intensity that she talks about patients. When she first proposed building mobile trucks, she admits she knew nothing about them. Her response was essentially: I’ll learn. The first truck is still running years later and has travelled more than 200,000 kilometres. Perhaps that explains why PinkDrive has endured. Noelene doesn’t seem particularly interested in whether something is difficult. She is interested in what has to happen next.

And when she says, “Nothing is impossible until it’s actually done,” you believe that she has spent much of her life testing the proposition.

Watch Noelene and PinkDrive in action