The American Cancer Society has been awarded a $1.99 million, five-year grant to improve support and access to care for people living with cancer in low-and-middle-income countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. This funding will help ACS expand patient navigation to countries with a growing burden of cancer.
The grant was awarded by the Merck Foundation.
More than 70% of the nine million cancer-related deaths worldwide are in resource-limited settings, where patients face many barriers to timely diagnosis and high-quality cancer care.
With support from the foundation, ACS will fortify its patient navigation program in Kenyatta National Hospital, a national referral hospital in Kenya, and adapt it for The Uganda Cancer Institute, a high need facility in Uganda which serves about 200 patients daily.
This grant is a first step toward expansion of patient navigation programs. As part of this, ACS said it will create a comprehensive guide and toolkit to develop and implement patient navigation programs, designed specifically for health facilities in low- and middle-income countries.
“Uganda has a population of 43 million, but there are only 20 oncologists in the entire country,” Jackson Orem, executive director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, said in a statement. “That’s one of the reasons why patient navigators are so important in helping patients manage the day-to-day challenges that prevent them from receiving care and empowering them to seek treatment and stay in care.”
ACS will work with the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University to evaluate the implementation of the patient navigation programs in Kenya and Uganda as well as the pilot of the program design guide and implementation toolkit.
