training

The Uganda Cancer Institute, set up in Kampala in 1967 as a centre for research and treatment of lymphoma, was one of the first cancer treatment centres in East Africa, and continues to play a leading role as a national…

Rahul Jain and his mother Shashi were in Pune – 1,000 km from their home in Ashoknagar, in the neighbouring state of Madhya Pradesh – when they were told there was no hope. They had undertaken the long journey together…

Patient advocates for a wide range of cancer communities across Europe spent four days at the start of July honing the skills they need to influence the policy, research and healthcare decisions that matter to them. This was the second…

Spinal surgeon Bronek Boszczyk has said that training in complex surgery is like having to learn the violin during a full orchestral concert. The training revolves around closely supervised surgery on real patients in a real operating theatre – which…

Manjula (not her real name) was deeply surprised when she was diagnosed with stage 3 stomach cancer at the age of 52. She was healthy and had no other ailments. And when her medical team in South India addressed her…

Gynaecologist Shalini Singh remembers the Pap smears she carried out until around twenty years ago, when she was working at the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences, in New Delhi. “We had about 15 Pap smear bottles per day…

The development of next generation sequencing (NGS) has been a game changer for our understanding of genetics, and in turn for many aspects of biomedicine. This includes cancer, where it has led to greater understanding of the genetic changes that…

If cancer screening policies were driven purely by mortality rates and curability, then lung cancer would long have topped the priority list for population screening programmes. Accounting for almost one in every four cancer deaths in men and almost one…

When you look at the vast waiting area in Mumbai’s world leading Tata Memorial Cancer Hospital, pictured above, what do you see? A crowded chaotic scene where sick patients and their relatives sit around for hours, waiting, hoping for someone…

Surgery has been the mainstay for treating solid tumours since the dawn of cancer treatment, and recent decades have seen a huge increase in the complexity and multidisciplinary demands of carrying out cancer operations. So it can come as a…