IOWA CITY, Iowa (KCRG) - Nurses at University of Iowa Health Care’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center are working with a local nonprofit to make sure cancer patients don’t have to choose between treatment and their next meal.

Health care workers say a cancer diagnosis can quickly overwhelm families with new expenses — from travel and lodging to the cost of ongoing medical care. Those financial pressures, they say, are pushing even previously stable households into food insecurity.

“We saw a need. We saw patients who didn’t have food or resources to get food, and it’s such a bare, simple thing people need while they’re going through treatment,” said Stephanie Schwake, a UIHC nurse clinician.

To address the problem, nurses helped create a partnership between UIHC and HACAP to distribute

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