The Bush Institute, in partnership with the CDC Foundation, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, recently launched a new toolkit to guide countries in the collection and use of cervical cancer data and to enhance the quality, coverage, and scale of interventions against the disease.
Every year, cervical cancer kills more than 300,000 women, with nearly 90% of these deaths occurring in limited resource settings. Of all cancers, cervical cancer is one of the most preventable and treatable, yet it is also one of the leading cancer killers of women in limited resource settings. While global efforts to implement prevention and treatment programs have increased, the need for high-quality data to track screening coverage and treatment rates became clear.
On World Cancer Day, February 4, the George W. Bush Institute in partnership with the CDC Foundation, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the World Health Organization (WHO) launched a new toolkit to guide countries in the collection and use of standardized data on cervical cancer and to enhance the quality, coverage, and scale of interventions against the disease. This toolkit will enable countries to better plan, implement, monitor, and evaluate their cervical cancer prevention and treatment efforts.
The toolkit creates global standards drawing on international expertise and field experience in Sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Latin America, regions with the highest incidence rates. Although cervical cancer burden as well as prevention and treatment strategies can vary from country to country, the toolkit focuses on five issues:
- Identifying opportunities for strengthening country data and data systems
- Measuring population coverage of cervical cancer screening and prevention
- Implementing and strengthening systems to routinely monitor patients and programs
- Assessing facilities for service readiness, availability, and quality
- Estimating costs of cervical cancer screening and treatment programs
It is our hope that this toolkit and the data it can provide on screening coverage and treatment rates will prevent any woman from dying needlessly of a preventable disease.
