Training African Pathologists in Cancer Staging

Inadequate pathology services result in ineffective treatment programs due to delayed or inaccurate diagnoses, which affect patient care directly and lead to erroneous estimates of disease rates. This results in a compromised ability for health care systems to plan for resource allocation, which in turn results in poorer clinical outcomes. In most sub-Saharan African countries, varying standards of pathology training and the scarcity of a skilled pathology workforce have limited the quality of cancer diagnosis, impairing the quality of cancer care and the accuracy of cancer registry data. Our training program will improve the ability of the anatomic pathology workforce in sub-Saharan Africa to detect and diagnose cancer using standard approaches that are commonly in use in the US, UK, and European Union.

To date, we have held three workshops in Nairobi Kenya, which have involved 54 different participants from 16 different institutions. Feedback from prior participants has been encouraging; in a recent survey, 100% of respondents reported that they would be interested in attending future courses. Participants also outlined various changes that have occurred at their institutions as a result of the workshop, including the adoption of synoptic reporting and improvements in staging, grading, and grossing of specimens.

Planning for future workshops is already underway! These workshops require extensive planning; we have begun to hold regular meetings with workshop faculty to discuss how this model can be expanded and exactly what that will look like. During future workshops, participants will learn using a combination of lectures, case-based teaching methods, and online learning components.  We are also excited to explore offering the workshops in different locations across Africa going forward.

Planning will culminate in an in-person meeting in Kigali, Rwanda on November 4^th, 2017.  This meeting promises to be an engaging kickoff to a strong network dedicated to increasing capacity for cancer diagnosis in Africa through workforce training!