Dr. Simon Pierre Boni
Côte d’Ivoire’s cancer death to incidence ratio was 0.66 in 2022, which is significantly higher than that of high-income regions such as the USA (0.25). Côte d’Ivoire lacks a standardized system that notifies patients and their oncologists when their pathology test results are available. Instead, Ivorian patients must travel to their hospital’s pathology department – often multiple times – to check if their results are available. Once they have these results, patients have to carry the results to an oncologist to read the diagnosis. These steps result in long delays between a cancer’s detection and a patient’s start of treatment, which contribute to the country’s high cancer mortality rates.
With support from BVGH, Dr. Simon Pierre Boni of the National Cancer Control Program (PNLCa) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire successfully applied for and received an Interdisciplinary Policy-Oriented Research on Africa (IPORA) grant to pilot a new cancer patient referral system. With this grant, Dr. Boni will develop a simplified digital tool to communicate laboratory results between oncologists, pathologists, and patients. Additionally, patient navigators will be trained to transport patient samples between hospital departments – a task that cancer patients are currently responsible for. The results of Dr. Boni’s project will help mitigate the non-medical barriers that complicate the cancer patient pathway in Côte d’Ivoire, thereby reducing the time between detection and treatment, and ultimately leading to improved treatment outcomes.