African Cancer Organisation establishes cancer registry at Battor

The African Cancer Organisation (ACO) has established a hospital-based cancer registry at the Battor Catholic Hospital in the North Tongu District of the Volta Region.

The goal is to collect, store and analyse data on persons with cancer to provide essential information for patient monitoring, treatment evaluation and to assess the general burden of cancers in the region.

Data from the registry will also help to evaluate the impact of prevention, early detection/screening, treatment and palliative care programmes.

Mr Paul Opoku Agyemang, Project Director, ACO, speaking at the commissioning, said cancer burden continued to grow globally, exerting tremendous physical, emotional and financial strain on individuals, families, communities and health systems.

Worldwide, an estimated 19.3 million new cancer cases and almost 10 million cancer deaths occurred in 2020.

More than 70 per cent of cancer deaths occurred in developing nations where resources for prevention and early detection are either limited or non-existent.

Mr Agyemang noted that many health systems in low-income countries were least prepared to manage the burden, and large numbers of cancer patients globally did not have access to timely quality diagnosis and treatment.

“A major reason, among several others, for such burden is attributed to lack of accurate cancer data and extensive research to quantify and ascertain the cancer burden in these emerging countries,” he emphasised.

He added that: “It is in light of this that the ACO has initiated its National Cancer Registry Programme and collaborated with institutions involved in cancer management, including the Battor Catholic Hospital, to implement such a novel cancer project to help understand some of the things we do not yet know about cancer here in Ghana.”

The registry, initiated in 2018, involved cancer registration training workshops for selected hospital staff and deployment of International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) recommended cancer registry software.

Under the project, datasets variables were generated and defined for cancer data abstraction.

Guidelines for the cancer registry manual were also developed and the cancer registry software configured based on the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O-3).

Cancer data were then collected, coded and stored in the customised cancer registry software using a specially developed Battor-specific cancer notification forms.

The cancer registry forms part of the national cancer registry being developed by ACO to act as a driver for cancer policy development and programme evaluation.

Spearheaded by Dr Bernard Hayford Atuguba, the Medical Superintendent of the Hospital, the Battor Cancer Registry, is the first and only registry in a rural setting in Ghana and its datasets contain all the key and mandatory variables recommended by the IARC.

This makes the data generated from the registry comparable to other international cancer data.

The writer is the Executive Project Director of the African Cancer Organisation