The ECHO Project, as I said earlier on, we don’t have enough personnel in Africa for effective cancer care and therefore we needed an innovative model to help to train more healthcare personnel and also give them mentorship and empowerment. So we used the ECHO model. Usually what we do is we do have some aspects in hub, in our hub, and we do weekly and monthly virtual ECHO clinics whereby we do have participants at our smaller district hospitals and clinics, our spoke sites, who join us every week. They present cases to us as experts in the hub and we discuss those cases, special cases, all cancer cases. Through the discussion we are able to impart knowledge and then we use specific protocols, train them on the protocols, on the early detection, management of the cancers and how they are followed up. Doing this every week on a constant frequency we are able to impart knowledge to the nurses and doctors in the district hospitals and they are able to manage the patients at their district hospitals and clinics and they no longer have to refer the patients to us.
Also one advantage is that because of the continued mentorship we are able to keep the doctors and nurses in the underprivileged and underserved areas of our province and in our country, in South Africa. At first most doctors and nurses in the rural areas were living there, they would go to a hospital or a clinic for about six months and then they would leave. But now with the use of ECHO, because there is continued mentorship, we are able to keep them there for some time, for a longer period.
In addition, this ECHO we are not only limiting it to South Africa, we also have Africa ECHO whereby we have monthly ECHO clinics and we have colleagues, we have collaborated with other centres in the US like MD Anderson Cancer Center. We do have an ECHO that we’re running monthly for cervical cancer control where we discuss early detection, prevention of cervical cancer through the use of HPV vaccination and also methods that we use to detect these early cases of cervical cancer. We discuss how the early cases are treated and also how we follow them up during these ECHO clinics throughout the whole of Africa.
What does the future look like for ECHO?
Our future plans for ECHO, specifically for my province in the Northern Cape of South Africa, our plan is to make sure that all the district hospitals are involved in Project ECHO. Secondly, we are also partnering with other bigger institutions in South Africa to make sure that the whole country, all the provinces, nine provinces of South Africa, participate effectively in Project ECHO. In addition, as we said, Africa, because we have limited resources, this is a model that we can use to make sure that the little resources that we have we are able to utilise it properly through the use of the ECHO model. Because with the use of the ECHO model we will be able to reach all the other African countries and assist them with training, mentorship, so that we can effectively handle cancer in Africa. Not only cancer but all the other non-communicable diseases also. With the use of ECHO we will be able to control those non-communicable diseases because now the main issue, the main diseases that are killing people are the non-communicable diseases and it’s in fact affecting the majority of low- and middle-income countries. With the use of ECHO we will be able to deal with this problem.
