Improve Cancer Care for 270 Children in Myanmar

Thank you so much for your kind support of World Child Cancer’s project in Myanmar, where we are working to improve the diagnosis, access to treatment and quality of care for children with cancer.

This past October, we sent a team of volunteer medical specialists from Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital and from Cambridge University Hospitals to provide support at our two partner hospitals in Myanmar: Yangon Children's Hospital and Mandalay Children's Hospital. The volunteers provided hands-on training in clinical treatment and laboratory diagnosis, and held workshops for paediatric oncologists at the hospitals to harmonise treatment protocols and supportive care guidelines for four types of cancer. The visit highlighted a number of areas of support that will need to be attended to in subsequent visits, including improving molecular diagnosis services to aid the diagnosis and treatment of leukaemia.

In September, we organised a training session on early warning signs of childhood cancer for ten paediatricians and nurses from the Mandalay and Sagaing regions. The trainers have cascaded that training to general practitioners to improve the early detection and referral of cancer among children. Since then, we have been regularly bringing together the teams at our partner hospitals and Myanmar Paediatrics Society to revise the early warning signs curriculum to ensure that it is a useful tool for delivering the trainings. The team is currently working on a simplified curriculum for basic health staff to extend the reach of the training and ensure more accurate diagnoses.

Lastly, data from the nutrition support programme we set up at Yangon Children’s Hospital earlier this year has shown that the initiative is having a positive impact on the nutritional status of cancer patients! Some cancers and cancer treatments can affect patients’ appetites and their ability to absorb nutrients from food, thereby worsening their nutritional status. Since the outset of the nutrition programme at YCH, 50% of children supported maintained their nutritional status and 25% improved it.

It is thanks to your support that we can continue to set precedents for the improvement of cancer care in Myanmar. Thank you for helping to give children with cancer the gift of growing up!