Supporting oncology professionals through education
The content on this site is intended for healthcare professionals only
The content on this site is intended for healthcare professionals only
ecancer, the leading global cancer education charity, is pleased to announce two new appointments to its board of trustees: Dr Cristian Herrera (Senior Health Specialist, World Bank) and Prof Groesbeck Parham (Senior Clinical Expert in the Cervical Cancer Elimination Initiative at the WHO, and CEO of Women’s Oncology Collective, Africa).
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has emphasised the urgent need to step up cancer services in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). WHO warns that the world will see a 60% increase in cancer cases over the next two decades with the greatest increase (an estimated 81%) in new cases occurring in LMICs, where survival rates are currently the lowest. All too often healthcare professionals in LMICs come up against financial, linguistic and geographical barriers to accessing the highest quality knowledge to inform cancer treatments.
ecancer’s new appointees have an extensive background in helping to overcome these barriers. As global experts with extensive experience in the global cancer environment, Dr Herrera and Prof Parham are well placed to further ecancer’s mission to raise the standards of care for cancer patients across the world through education.
Danny Burke (CEO of ecancer) commented, “We are honoured to have Drs Herrera and Parham join our board of trustees. Given their long standing and tireless work to tackle cancer worldwide, their presence on the board will bring great benefit to the ecancer global foundation and our vital projects to raise the standards of care for cancer patients globally.”
ecancer was founded in 2017 with the aim of democratising access to data and information that helps healthcare professionals to make informed decisions about cancer diagnoses and treatments. Every year, our educational resources support thousands of doctors, nurses and their colleagues to improve care for their patients across the world.
Global cancer research is insufficiently country-centred and too often still highly ‘colonialised’ which is a huge issue in LMICs as they have by far the greatest burden of cancer compared with high-income countries (HICs), more complex cancer ecosystems which results in a lack of data to inform effective cancer policies[i],[ii]. Yet support for cancer systems strengthening is abysmal with only 5% of world’s expenditure on cancer in LMIC settings.[iii] ecancer aims to tackle this global cancer care inequality, through our open access cancer journal – ecancermedicalscience which only accepts submissions which feature at least one author from an LMIC, or which have a significant impact on underserved settings, to help promote the global collaborations that are vital to the development of key skills. Together with our pioneering educational events series in Africa, Latin America and Asia, which focuses on improving clinical practice with supporting online resources, ecancer is striving to improve the care of cancer patients in the world’s poorest countries.
Dr Herrera is a Chilean physician specialising in health systems, policy, and economics, working in global health and development at the World Bank. He holds an MD from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, an MBA from the University of Chile, an MSc in Public Policy and Administration from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is a PhD in Public Health candidate at the University of Amsterdam. His main areas of interest are cancer policy, health policy/politics and systems, health financing and economics, evidence-informed health policy making, and global health.
Prof Groesbeck Parham, MD is CEO of Friends of Africa’s ‘Women’s Oncology Collective-Africa’ (WOCA) and Professor of Gynaecologic Oncology in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A board-certified gynaecologic oncologist, Prof Parham completed his obstetrics and gynaecology residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, urogynaecology fellowship at the University of London and Khartoum Teaching Hospital in Sudan, and gynaecologic oncology fellowship at the University of
California, Irvine. In 2005 Prof Parham moved from the U.S. to Lusaka, Zambia, being the only gynaecologic oncologist in Zambia and one of a handful in all of southern Africa, helped establish the Cervical Cancer Prevention Program in Zambia (CCPPZ) and the University Teaching Hospital’s Gynaecologic Oncology Fellowship Training Program.
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