The role of community health workers in cervical cancer screening in low-income and middle-income countries

Discussion
, ,
1

Cervical cancer prevention and screening has been described as one of the last frontiers of Universal Health Coverage. However, access to, and provision of, screening largely depends on the presence of robust health systems, with a trained workforce and appropriate funding.

This systematic scoping literature review describes the roles of CHWs in cervical cancer screening in LMICs and suggests that community-based approaches to cervical cancer screening are feasible, although the sociocultural context plays an important role in the acceptability of these interventions.

You can read the full review here: https://gh.bmj.com/content/4/3/e001452

1 Like
2

Looks like I missed this topic the first time round and am very glad to see this publication.
Our same day HPV point of care test and treat strategy (operational now for the past three years) would not be possible without community health workers being trained to instruct women on self collection, test HPV samples at the point of care or implement thermal ablation (TA) as first line treatment for HPV positive women. We also train the same CHW’s to identify women who require referral for precancerous or cancerous lesions. Moreover, I cannot imagine HPV screening, treatment or scale up in LMIC taking place without their front line involvement. Especially so given many LMIC locations have limited resources for preventing and managing cervical cancer.
FYI, the new WHO guidelines for the use of thermal ablation for the treatment of cervical pre-cancer lesions have just been released for those who are interested.
https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/thermal-ablation-for-cervical-pre-cancer-lesions/en/
As an aside, I have just finished comparing PreservCyt-ThinPrep against 4 non volatile transport PCR media for testing samples at the point of care - publication pending. The aim is to move away from using a transport media which is classified as a dangerous good, reduce shipping and handling costs and simplify sample transportation. The next step is to see if we can pool 2 or more samples into the one HPV NAAT POC test in an effort to accelerate screening speed and reduce testing costs.