Project description
Increasing screening to reduce cancer deaths
Screening for cancer followed by early treatment reduces mortality from colorectal, breast and cervical cancer, currently causing 155 000 deaths annually in eastern Europe. Screening in these countries is often less organised, leading to a lack of data, low coverage and minority groups being reached insufficiently. EU-TOPIA-EAST will improve the screening by investigating and implementing roadmaps developed under the first EU-TOPIA project. It will consider the local health and social systems in Georgia, Montenegro and Romania. The implemented programmes will be monitored using key indicators and EU-TOPIA tools, and by sophisticated decision models to predict the long-term benefits and harm-benefit ratios. Other (middle-income) countries will be involved in workshops, to share their experiences in improving screening programmes.
Objective
Colorectal, breast and cervical cancer cause 155,000 deaths each year in middle income countries (MIC) in Eastern Europe, while there is good evidence that a large proportion could be prevented by organized screening. Although many MIC in Eastern Europe have implemented some form of cancer screening, this screening is often non-organized, leading to lack of data and quality assurance systems. Also, coverage is commonly low and minority groups are not reached.
In a previous HORIZON2020 project ‘EU-TOPIA’, we developed road maps to improve cancer screening programmes in Europe. In the current project, EU-TOPIA-EAST, these roadmaps will be refined and translated into action plans for three MICs: Georgia (breast), Romania (cervix) and Montenegro (colorectal). These action plans will take the local health and social system into account by performing detailed barrier and stakeholder analyses, leading to feasible changes to current screening programs. Next, we will implement these action plans: e.g. in Georgia, we will increase coverage of the programme by establishing a new screening unit; in Romania, we will develop new IT infrastructure to allow invitation-based cervical cancer screening; and finally in Montenegro we will establish a new colonoscopy center to increase programme capacity decrease travel time for participants.
The implemented programs will be monitored and evaluated using key indicators and sophisticated decision models to predict the long-term and country-wide benefits, harms and cost-effectiveness. During workshops and roundtable discussions for policymakers and screening program coordinators from all countries in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean to build capacity and upscale the implementation of these intervention(s) in Equitable, Accessible, and SusTainable (EU-TOPIA-EAST) ways. In this way, the project will improve the prevention and early diagnosis of cancer in real-life settings in Eastern European and Mediterranean countries.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
3015 GD Rotterdam
Netherlands