The Mozambique Workshop
At the 12th meeting of the African Organization for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC), in Maputo, Mozambique, organizers convened a special workshop on the need for collaboration and coordination between governments and health systems in Africa with academic, industry, association and other nongovernmental organizations to improve the care of patients with cancer in Africa.
This workshop, coordinated by CIRGO with financial support from Bristol-Myers-Squibb, attracted over 220 participants and led to excellent dialog among conference attendees. The program included representatives from seven projects in Africa presenting their implementation science research and demonstration projects. Topics included patient access, South- South partnerships, in-country specialized training, a palliative care consortium, treatment outcomes, and focused pathology and diagnostic capacity building. Key partners of the various projects served as moderators and commentators during the session. Lessons learned and evidence of the value of partnerships were gathers and summarized.
The workshop highlighted the breadth of expertise required across the cancer care continuum in order to improve patient care, meaning that no single organization can effect change alone.
“The synthesis of the session presentations concluded that multipartner collaborations are critical for shared learning and so efforts are not duplicated, which will optimize advances in cancer care delivery in resource-constrained settings.”
AORTIC—the largest international conference that has a multidisciplinary focus on cancer in Africa—addresses cancers that affect Africans and care protocols and treatments that are relevant in the African environment. The 12th AORTIC conference convened in November of 2019 and attracted more than 1,000 participants from over 55 countries to engage in discussion around the theme, Cancer in Africa: Innovation, Strategies, Implementation.
