- Highlights of the main needs and challenges identified by the cities
- Local cancer care needs and prioritised responses at a glance: seven quick-reference documents available online
The summaries of the City Cancer Challenge (C/Can) situation analysis reports provide an overview of key gaps and areas to improve the quality of and access to cancer services in seven of our cities.
As the first of our Inside Stories highlighted, one of the foundational pieces of the C/Can city engagement process is a data-driven needs assessment to identify key gaps and opportunities for improving access to cancer care in C/Can cities. The needs assessment covers core elements of cancer care such as radiology and nuclear medicine, pathology and laboratory medicine, medical oncology, radiotherapy, surgery, and supportive and palliative care, and generates in-depth information on the quality and management of cancer care as well as on community access to cancer services.
In an inclusive process that brings together the main cancer care providers and experts from across a city, data is systematically collected through a purpose-built questionnaire. The data is subsequently reviewed in a series of inter-institutional, multi-stakeholder, topic-specific working group meetings to determine a city’s key needs and develop priority actions to address these. These findings are consolidated in a situational analysis that provides an in-depth overview of a city’s cancer care capacity.
A special article on C/Can’s Framework, which is part of a series of peer-reviewed articles in JCO Global Oncology that share insights and experiences of cities as enablers of cancer care, outlines C/Can’s city engagement process in detail.
Across the seven cities where the needs-assessment process has been completed, a total of almost 1300 healthcare professionals from more than 180 institutions as well as more than 900 patients have contributed. The cities of Leon and Greater Petaling, which joined the C/Can network more recently, are currently in or preparing the needs-assessment stage of the city engagement process.
“It’s a data-driven process. Local stakeholders collect, process and analyze all the results coming from the needs assessment, and based on that they establish the priorities, which are then translated into projects.” Rolando Camacho, Global Technical Lead, C/Can
C/Can’s City Snapshots are summaries of the situational analysis reports that were generated in each city following their respective needs assessments conducted between 2017 and 2019 in:
Following the needs-assessment phase, C/Can supports a comprehensive, inter-institutional action-planning exercise that results in a roadmap for cancer care which forms the basis for developing and prioritising city projects and identifying resource mobilisation, capacity development and technical cooperation needs. C/Can’s latest annual report provides an overview of progress in each city.
