End Cervical Cancer in the Philippines using Digital Cervicography & Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid.
Flagship Project Description.
Cervical cancer is a preventable disease. Yet, its the 2nd most common cancer among Filipino women. Ineffective cancer screening, cost and unavailability of doctors along the periphery of the country attributes some of the root causes. Recently, a cheaper screening method – Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) has showed comparable results to gold standard Paps Smear.This involves swabbing of vinegar into the cervix and direct visual interpretation in minutes.In the absence of local physicians in an area, midwives are presently are trained to perform such procedure to address this issue. If procedure would have been combined with Digital Cervicography ( a procedure in which a non-physician takes pictures of the cervix and submits them to a physician for interpretation)direct results and patient disposition (decision when to refer further work-up or not for better diagnosis) would have been incomparably better. Overall, this leads to improvement of our cervical mortality and morbidity.A comparative local inter-observer study is being done to date approved by the Institutional Review Board at Tondo Medical Center. The project has been applied for Global Grant RY 2019-2020. The grant shall be used to construct a secured online system to host private patient medical records shared to midwives and specialized physicians for interpretation, and equipments in the
conduction of cervical cancer screening shared to Rotary Clubs with communities without medical physicians.
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