Richard Sullivan, Co-Director of the Centre for Conflict and Health Research, and Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Policy has always been a kaleidoscope working across multiple social, economic, technical and political levels. And cancer policy is no exception. But our recent examination of global cancer policy reveals all is not well.
Despite some national progress as well as global movements such as cervical cancer elimination (mainly HPV vaccination) and childhood cancers, the general conclusion is that ‘global cancer’ has made little headway into the global health and development agenda. And this is despite significant agitation across multiple civil and academic platforms.
Part of the issue is that the messaging remains deeply contested and fragmented. This isn’t helped by a global system dominated by community, primary care, and infectious diseases, which have little grasp of complex hospital-based care. Neither is it helped by subsumming cancer into a generic ‘NCD’ bucket, or dicotomising cancer policy as either low-middle income or high income-centric.
All these are intellectual wastelands. The targets set out in Rev. 4 of the political declaration of the 4th high-level meeting on prevention and control of NCDs are a complete fantasy.
Multiple groups are setting out conflicting, evidence-free global metrics and policy initiatives – 5x5x5 by 2035, Mission Early, Project Zero – which only add further fuel to the fires of obfuscation. Seen through the Kingdom lens, evidence-based problem sets, and political action are either absent, misaligned and/or simply wrong.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that downstream policy (solutions) fail. But there are rapidly transitioning countries – e.g., Türkiye, China, Malaysia, et al – that have clearly managed to align problem sets, politics, and policy. Understanding the ‘how’ in these national settings could go a long way in helping set more realistic international policy.”
Title: Factors shaping the priority of cancer in global health: a qualitative policy analysis
Authors: Kristina Jenei, Khalid El Bairi, Jeannette Parkes, Richard Sullivan, Cherian Varghese, Ajay Aggarwal
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