Practice, policy and advocacy reports

Track 4 - Strengthening cancer control: optimising outcomes of health systems

Effective national cancer control planning

2016WCC/PPAR-1725

South-to-South and "Helpdesk" Support for Scaling-Up Cervical Cancer Prevention in Africa

Scott Wittet^{* 1}, Julie Torode², Melissa Rendler-Garcia³, Sally Cowal⁴, Ann McMikel⁵, Jose Jeronimo¹, Vivien Tsu¹, Francesca Holme¹, Sarah Goltz⁶, Celina Schocken⁷, Enriquito Lu⁸, Jacqui Drope⁵ and the Cervical Cancer Action coalition

¹PATH, Seattle, United States, ²UICC, Geneva, Switzerland, ³UICC, Miami, ⁴American Cancer Society, Washington, DC, ⁵American Cancer Society, Atlanta, ⁶Sage Innovation, Brooklyn, NYC, ⁷Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, Washington, DC, ⁸Jhpiego, Baltimore, United States

Background and context: Cervical cancer claims 270,000 lives each year, mainly in low-resource settings. Proven, affordable, and effective cervical cancer prevention methods include HPV vaccination of adolescent girls and precancer screening and treatment for adult women. Low- and lower middle-income countries worldwide are implementing pilot programs, or are considering scale-up, and some have gained experience with population-based programs. Planning committees tasked with designing pilot, or national, programs need technical advice and counsel regarding effective program strategies and lessons learned about overcoming implementation challenges.

Aim: This program seeks to increase access to information relevant for prevention planning.

Strategy/Tactics: Programs in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua successfully use the phone-based WhatsApp messaging application to foster knowledge sharing among program staff scaling up screening services. Cervical Cancer Action (CCA), a global coalition seeking to bring HPV vaccination and cervical screening and preventive treatment to all women, recently committed to piloting a similar system in Africa. The new system will connect program managers in different countries so that they can share lessons gleaned from their national experiences. It also will connect these leaders with experts from UICC, PATH, the American Cancer Society, Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, Jhpiego, and other agencies to answer questions on prevention program strategy and tactics (similar to UICC’s “Helpdesk” system for cancer staging).

Program/Policy process: Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and other African countries have experience to share regarding HPV vaccination and precancer screening and treatment programs. Creating a cross-national communication platform for program managers and experts will facilitate discussion of strategies and shared learning between the countries.

Outcomes: The platform will consist of two linked elements: 1) a member-driven messaging application for questions, answers, and comments and 2) a searchable web site for easy access to archived messaging app content (questions and responses, tools, background documents).

What was learned: In addition to the platforms in Latin America, PATH, a co-chair of CCA, has had success using WhatsApp to foster peer support for non-cancer health topics in Tanzania and Zambia. This presentation will describe results of these experiences, discuss plans for the new initiative, and will encourage additional partnerships with UICC members attending the Congress.

Disclosure of Interest: None Declared

Keywords: Cervical, Planning, Screening , Vaccination