Victoria Forster, Patient and Community Engagement Lead at Women’s College Hospital, shared on LinkedIn:
“In 2017 I became a member of the TED Fellows Program and delivered my TED talk in Arusha, Tanzania in summer on cancer survivorship.
When I found out I was going to Tanzania, I wanted to learn as much as I could about what life was like for children with cancer and their families there, conscious that my UK/Canada centric experiences as a patient and then research scientist did not reflect the lived reality of many people globally.
I reached out to a physician at the children’s cancer hospital in the capital Dar es Salaam who graciously invited me to visit while I was there. I changed my travel plans so I could spend some time there and spent a day meeting clinicians, children with cancer and their families.
In many ways, what I saw was so very similar to my own experience of being treated for cancer when I was younger. Dedicated clinicians, children being children despite difficult circumstances and parents all doing their very best. But the reality is that past that, our experiences were very different.
Late-stage diagnoses, lack of drugs and supportive care were among the big barriers to improving survival in Tanzania. When I visited, substantial progress had already been made and there’s been further, incredible progress in the almost decade since I was there.
A couple of months ago, I checked in with the same clinician who invited me to Tanzania back in 2017 to discuss the last two decades of progress and talk about what still needs to be done to improve survival and survivorship for children with cancer in Tanzania. You can read my CancerWorld story below.
Something I have never done since my visit there is say ‘Over 80% of children now survive cancer long-term’ without qualification, as I did before. I always now say ‘…in high-income countries,’ or similar. Because the reality is that children with cancer worldwide and their families do not experience the same care.
They do not all reap the benefits from multi-million dollar research. Improvements in care that drive up survival are not always from breakthrough new drugs.
And as a passionate patient advocate, I think we need to acknowledge that more this childhood cancer awareness month.
Read the CancerWorld story.”
CancerWorld Explores Tanzania’s Transformation in Childhood Cancer Care
