"You don't find places like this anymore," a doctor told Kathy Finn. "It's like a mom-and-pop."

While many people aren't used to thinking of Boston Medical Center in those terms, it appears to be true at least of the hospital's Cancer Support Services.

We sat in the "healing garden," an alcove with benches and plants in the window on the second floor of the hospital's Moakley Building-Kathy Finn, Nurse Practitioner and clinical research nurse; her daughter Katie Finn, manager of the Patient Navigator program; and Program Assistant Pat Oliver (who worked at USES for many years), and we talked about the program.

Kathy was back visiting her old haunts in Boston, having left BMC in mid-May to take a position at City of Hope, the large cancer center northeast of Los Angeles, where her son and two grandchildren live. As Pat, a volunteer in the program for two years before becoming Program Assistant, describes her, Kathy is a woman "who has made a huge impact on how BMC serves cancer patients."

Back in the late '70s, Kathy came to what was then Boston City Hospital as a student nurse; by the mid-'80s she was working in oncology. After shifting around a bit, she joined the staff at the just-established Cancer Clinical Trials Office in 1991.

At the time, a large number of patients, mostly minorities, had no access to clinical trials of cancer drugs. The prevailing attitude was that minorities weren't interested in clinical trials. It didn't help that the U.S. Public Health Service's Tuskegee experiment, 1932 to1972, in which black men went untreated for syphilis, was still current in many minds. People were leery of "scientific" studies.

Kathy began going to churches, health fairs, and anywhere else she could think of, sharing information about cancer and the benefits of clinical trials. Pat said she admired the way Kathy, who is white, went out to talk to groups of black men with prostate cancer and won them over. Thanks largely to Kathy, minorities are now enrolled in clinical trials at a high rate. "Relationship is the key," says Kathy. She also set up and directed the navigator program to help patients overcome the barriers that keep them from potentially life-saving services, and she played a key role in starting a stem cell transplant program for amyloidosis, another life-threatening disease.

It's my theory that Kathy, 61, is as tough and effective as she is because of her Old South End heritage. Her parents lived on East Brookline Street years ago; her mother was born there.

Now headed by Bob David, with Program Assistants Cyrena Gasse and Pat Oliver, Cancer Support Services, true to its name, gives a great deal of support to its patients, some of whom have few resources and little support at home. The program offers many groups, including knitting, cooking demo classes, recipe swaps, Tai Chi, meditation, and Zumba! Depressed patients often come to the hospital because the personalized care is so important to them. Sad to say, "a diagnosis of cancer might not be the worst thing they heard that day," says Kathy.

One day, after an exercise class in the Moakley lobby, participants were asked if they would like a reminder call before the next class, and everyone did, some because they get so few calls in general. Staff takes all of this to heart. "From everything we learned, we changed things," Kathy explains.

Barriers to care come in many forms. Consent forms for clinical trials can take a long time to fill out-staff spends the time. Public transportation in the bus-dependent BMC area can be time consuming and frustrating, and parking is an issue. While the BMC shuttle, the Ride, donated taxi rides, and volunteer drivers help, they don't meet the need. Strangely, in a neighborhood where there are two or three beauty supply stores catering to black women, BMC cancer programs have a hard time stocking enough dark makeup and dark wigs. A lot of the wigs we get are blond, says Patient Navigator Katie Finn. South Ender Mary Grams, a volunteer in a related American Cancer Society program at the hospital, told me about the Feel Good-Feel Better, a once-a-month program in which women patients experiment with make-up, wigs, scarves, skin care and other accessories to help them look and feel better, but there aren't enough there either. The American Cancer Society and the hospital are looking for donations.

A newsletter is published four times a year, packed with a schedule of sessions on all forms of cancer, as well as classes in "legacy writing" and free tickets to cultural events. Among big events were the 10th annual Survivors Celebration in May and the Catwalk for Cancer Care held at 60 State Street in June.

Alison Barnet is the author of South End Character, Speaking Out on Neighborhood Change. You can buy it at the South End Branch Library-$10.