The American Cancer Society Road to Recovery Program is looking for volunteers in the Carbon and Emery area to assist cancer patients with transportation to and from their treatments. There are two ways for individuals to volunteer, either by becoming a driver or help coordinate the rides for the patients.

Sharon Hinckley, Mission Delivery Manager spoke about the program, “What the program is, is you volunteer your time, the use of your vehicle and your gas and you would drive a patient up for their cancer treatment and then take them back home in Price again. So you are looking at anywhere from a three to five-hour commitment depending on what their treatment is for that day.” Generally, patients from our area will go to treatments in the Provo a few times a week, other patients may go up to five days a week. It all depends on the type of cancer and the treatment that is required at the time.

This is a wonderful chance for volunteers to encourage and support a patient going through treatments and possible make lasting friendships. “We do require all of our volunteers to be trained and the reason we do that is that aside from your personal auto mobile insurance the Cancer Society also steps in with coverage,” said Hinckley. The extra coverage is just to cover all bases for the driver and patient when traveling back and forth.

Individuals that are wanting to be a driver must be between the ages of 18 to 84 years old, must pass both a driving and criminal back ground check. “All of our training is done through our Volunteer Coordination Center. So you really do the training at your convenience, it will roughly take 45 minutes to an hour to get through the program and submit your paper work and then you hear back anywhere between 24 hours to a week later whether or not your background stuff cleared and then you are ready to drive,” stated Hinckley.

If you would like to help alleviate the worry for a cancer patient by assisting them with transportation or would like to be a coordinator which is the backbone of the Road to Recovery program you can contact Sharon Hinckly at (801) 493-4724 or Sharon.hinckley@cancer.org