Happy
International Pathology Day! Today—Wednesday, November 10—we celebrate this annual awareness day to recognize the vital work of pathologists and medical laboratory professionals who dedicate their lives to improving health outcomes for patients around the globe. It is also an opportunity to raise awareness of the health challenges that people in resource-limited countries experience on a daily basis.
On this day, we highlight the important work that ASCP is doing in collaboration with the Coalition for implementation Research in Global Oncology, or CIRGO, to improve access to cancer tissue diagnosis in low- and middle-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. CIRGO is a multi-sector coalition, comprising implementers and funders, who support collaborative and coordinated interventions to expand cancer care capacity in under-resourced countries.
CIRGO’s focus is three-fold:
To develop a collaborative platform that aims to promote implementation research, innovative solutions and high-impact initiatives in global oncology through cross-sector commitment. (Implementation research is a field of health research that seeks to improve the effectiveness of public health and clinical policies and programs.)
To leverage implementation research in order to strengthen health systems and advance cancer care capacity building and to develop the tools to do so in a sustainable manner.
To advance partnerships in addressing the global oncology health needs of under-resourced countries and communities.
In 2020, CIRGO awarded its first eight grants totaling $469,946 to investigators in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) to study aspects of the cancer care system. With this first round of projects well under way, CIRGO and ASCP are now reviewing applications for the 2021-2022 grant cycle. Successful applicants will work with CIRGO advisors to design implementation research projects that explore important questions about cancer diagnosis and care in LMICs.
Larry Shulman, MD, Director of the Center for Global Cancer Medicine in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent his career providing cancer care in the United States. “We worry about the quality of care and the outcomes for our patients, but it’s even more important in the context of a country like Rwanda or Botwana or Haiti,” he says.
“The worst mistake we could make is to provide cancer care and not understand what we are accomplishing, what the remaining gaps in care are, and how our patients are doing,” Dr. Shulman adds. “If we don’t do that, we really don’t know whether we are succeeding in our work or not.”
Data is critical to the ability to evaluate the quality of care, whether patients experience toxicities and how they manage their reaction. “It’s even more true in resource-constrained settings where we don’t have all the (resources) that we have in a high-income country and yet we have managed to provide care well,” Dr. Shulman said.
Learn more about the work that ASCP and CIRGO are doing to improve the implementation of cancer care in Sub-Saharan Africa by clicking
here.
