PREVENTING BREAST AND CERVICAL CANCERS IN LUSHNJE: MBROHU, TESTOHU! Breast and Cervical cancer prevalence in Albania is very high, especially in the Lushnje region of central Albania. The needs assessment conducted by the Institute of Public Health and the Health Directorate of Lushnje attributes part of it to the lack of information and poor training of health practitioners in local level. Increasing Breast and Cervical Cancer awareness to community members and improving the capacities of local health employees to improve the quality of services in this field has become a priority for the Ministry of Health. As such, the local Health Education volunteer in collaboration with the Directorate of Public Health in Lushnje and the experts of the Institute of Public Health recently received and implemented a USAID-funded SPA project, entitled: Preventing Breast and Cervical Cancers in Lushnje: Mbrohu, Testohu! The project addressed two key issues: one, that women do not have the information they need to take care of their own health, nor do they know where to access needed services; and two, that while local nurses are the best human resource to improve services for women, they are poorly informed and lack proper resources. To address the issues, the project team trained 48 nurses from 10 villages on breast cancer pathology and prevention. After the training, the Office of Health Promotion set two follow-up tasks: 1) Organize womens health fairs in the remote sites where the trained nurses work as well as outreach to local men; The aim of this task is to inform the women and man about the risks of breast and cervical cancer and the preventive measure against these diseases; and 2) Identify five women from each village (for a total of 50 women) with immediate need for breast health services to receive free echograms in Lushnje. It was the first time that an initiative of this kind was undertaken in Lushnje region and as such it got national attention. The Ministry of Health and The Institute of Public Health want to replicate the same experience in national level. For this reason, the Health Education volunteer was invited to share her experience working on a nurses’ training program for breast cancer education and prevention in rural areas, and the finding of her project in an international level conference held in Tirana in October – the international month of breast cancer screening. The Volunteer’s speech, which was held in Albanian language, was one of five speeches given by leading Albanian physicians and guests from the European Institute of Oncology. Her comments, stressing the need for a national standard of data collection as well as empowering the role of nurses in rural areas to distribute information, were broadcasted live to a national audience as a part of the Ministry of Health’s extensive media coverage of activities for World Breast Cancer Awareness month.
Posted on: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 16:30:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015