Factors Influencing Surgical and Cancer Care and Outcomes for Children in Northern Tanzania

Locations
Tanzania
Current status
Awaiting IRB approval

Factors Influencing Surgical and Cancer Care and Outcomes for Children in Northern Tanzania

Project overview

Access to timely, affordable, and safe surgical care is limited in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially among children. To address this crisis, targeted and accurate measurement of surgical care is a critical first step. Surgical services are essential to achieving global health goals in a wide range of areas as childhood cancer, where surgery can be used as a preventive, diagnostic, curative, supportive, palliative, or reconstructive procedure. Children with cancer surgical needs in LMICs are frequently forgotten in policy and planning and therefore have a high risk of being left untreated. The need for cancer surgical systems for children in LMICs is even more compelling by the fact that these countries contain 85% of cases, but only 43% and 30% survival rates and diagnostic rates, respectively. Furthermore, multifactorial barriers remain unsolved, and innovative, cost-effective interventions are still needed. At current levels of health system performance, it is estimated that over 11 million children will die from cancer between 2020 and 2050. However, we have a window of opportunity to expand the coverage of surgical cancer care for children in LMICs by using the momentum that followed the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery in 2015 and the WHO Global Initiative for Childhood Cancer in 2018 to guide governments in scaling up high-quality systems to improve child survival rates globally by 2030.

There are multiple reasons for the poor outcomes of children with cancer in LMICs, but the main factors are related to preventable delays in diagnosis and treatment. Scarce literature has reported that barriers to cancer care for children in Tanzania varied along the continuum of care and included travel distance, early diagnosis, lack of personnel, and treatment abandonment. However, there is still a large gap in the information needed to inform comprehensive interventions to scale up the surgical and cancer care for children in northern Tanzania, especifically, the Kilimanjaro region.

This is a mixed-methods, cross sectional, and hospital-based study. The quantitative component of the study will be useful to establish a baseline and set clear measurement goals. The qualitative component will be useful to understand these metrics better from the lenses of a wide range of stakeholders. Both components will constitute a foundational step in developing comprehensive interventions aimed to increase pediatric surgical and cancer care in northern Tanzania.

Start Date: TBD
End Date: TBD
Grant: DGHI Priority Location Collaborator Grant

Main Topic

Surgery and cancer care for children

Partners
Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC), Moshi, Tanzania