Global Health & Childhood Cancer

What do you do if you don’t have enough money to pay for your child’s cancer treatment? This is one of the difficult questions faced by some families in India today. Answering this question is one of the reasons Aroh, a non-profit that supports families with children enduring cancer treatment, was founded. Today on the […]

How does a child with cancer in India access care? If you’ve ever had an illness that was difficult to diagnose, you know that navigating the medical system can be incredibly frustrating. Bouncing back and forth between doctors, taking time off of work or school, waiting for hours upon hours, all while you don’t feel […]

How many healthcare professionals in the world are caring for children with cancer? Tap the link for more info: https://siop-online.org/globalmapping/  This is a very important question. How many people are caring for kids with cancer around the world? Where are they located? What regions have few or no doctors available? For a child with cancer, […]

Have you ever completed a very difficult puzzle? (Below is just an intro! – Click here to go to the whole essay.  You don’t want to miss it!) Perhaps it was thousands of small pieces with colors that blend together, so that most of the pieces appeared very similar. Do you remember the overwhelmed feeling […]

How do we measure the impact of a childhood cancer diagnosis?  There are many ways to we could try to measure the total burden of childhood cancer in the world. We could count the number of new cases per year, for instance, a measure called incidence. Or we could count the number of patients who […]

Food is Medicine: Promoting nutrition in global oncology Studies show that children with cancer who are well nourished have better treatment outcomes than those who are malnourished. Unfortunately, many children in developing countries are malnourished even before they are diagnosed with cancer, their nutritional status only worsens due to the combined effect of the disease […]

The Transformative Perspective In the last few months, evidence has emerged that pediatric cancer is more common, more deadly, and responsible for a much larger proportion of the global burden of disease than we previously believed. Moreover, recent publications show that pediatric oncology is not only possible to treat in low-resource countries with risk-adapted protocols, […]

SIOP PODC Nursing Working Group: The Advocacy Toolkit Today on the podcast, we discuss a new advocacy toolkit that nurses can use to help improve the safety of their work environment and the quality of care they provide to patients. This discussion is a follow-up to episode 11, where we discussed the Baseline Nursing Standards […]

Where are all of the pediatric cancer patients? There are times where new research completely changes the way one looks at a problem.  The two articles we discuss on this episode changed the way I think about global oncology.  Prior to reading the articles, if you asked me what is the most common reason for […]

SIOP PODC Nursing Working Group: Baseline Nursing Standards Nurses are one of the most important members of the healthcare team for children with cancer. In many ways, nurses are the final common pathway for providing care in both inpatient and outpatient settings.  Oftentimes in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), healthcare systems do not emphasize nursing […]

Parents of childhood cancer patients are arguably the most important members of a child’s treatment team.  Yet many times in resource-limited settings, parents are not equipped with the knowledge to successfully care for the specialized heath needs fo their children.  On this episode of GHCC, we discuss a multi-country assessment of the educational needs of […]

Episode Summary Today we talk to Dr. Saskia Mostert, MD, PhD, a pediatric oncologist in the Netherlands who has tremendous experience working with healthcare providers to improve the care of patients in Indonesia and Kenya. Much of her works centers around the time she has spent listen to families to understand how they experience treatment, […]

Additional Resources Download Dr. Rossell’s slides from the SIOP Treatment Abandonment symposium: Psychosocial Support to Reduce Treatment Abandonment Important recent publications by Dr. Rossell: Community resources support adherence to treatment for childhood cancer in El Salvador Choosing a miracle: Impoverishment, mistrust, and discordant views in abandonment of treatment of children with cancer in El Salvador […]

I want to give you a very brief introduction to the purpose behind Global Health and Childhood Cancer.  Practically speaking, it is going to be an interview-based podcast, where I talk to important thought leaders in fields related to global health or oncology about their expertise.  Hopefully, this first year I’ll aim to release 1-2 […]