Preventing cervical cancer through community health centres

Cervical cancer is easily preventable, but is the leading cause of cancer death for women in Uganda, with women living with HIV at particular high risk. Lack of awareness, misconceptions and hard to reach cervical screening facilities contribute to unmet need for cervical screening and treatment of lesions to prevent cancer developing. Over the last 5 years, we have been developing a one-stop cervical screening and treatment clinic integrated with Kagote Health Centre in Fort Portal which has screened over 1500 women since 2019. Central to this has been the EVA device, a simple colposcope mounted on a mobile phone which is specially designed for low-resource settings and allows midwives and nurses to more effectively visualise the cervix, engage women in their own care, and receive telemedicine support from cervical cancer specialists in the UK. We want to extend this work to another site in Kasangati Health Centre in Kampala, where an urban population of women with high rates of HIV still struggle to access cervical screening. £2000 would provide a new EVA device for Kampala and £1500 would provide a portable cold coagulation device, which is rechargeable and does not use any consumable products, for effective treatment of early lesions and prevention of cervical cancer.