Its strategic goal is straightforward enough: saving young lives.
Stated another way, a world-renowned paediatric medical centre, Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, often called Sick Kids, is gearing up to launch a special initiative in Barbados and several other Caribbean countries to help boost the survival chances of hundreds of children suffering from cancer.
And a Barbadian, Dr Victor Blanchette, a recognized world expert in paediatric cancer and blood disorders in Canada, is to head up the five-year CAN$8 million (BDS$15.7 million) Caribbean Paediatric Cancer and Blood Programme that will also be conducted in Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and some of their neighbours.
Blanchette, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Toronto, a senior associate scientist in the Research Institute and a clinical investigator in the Toronto hospital’s Department of Paediatrics, will be the initiative’s medical director.
“In the Caribbean, paediatric cancers and serious blood disorders are often fatal because of a shortage of health care professionals and resources to diagnose and treat children,” said Blanchette and other experts at the Toronto hospital. Sick Kids is working with partners across the Caribbean to improve the outcome for children affected by these devastating childhood diseases.”
On February 14 in Toronto, Sick Kids will officially announce the special programme. On March 11, the hospital plans a “cultivation event” in Barbados at the home of one of its donors.
Blanchette and other experts at Sick Kids said they would provide training in oncology, lab analysis and nursing to physicians, nurses and other health professionals in the six Caribbean nations.
“What are the chances that a child who has cancer, born and treated in Toronto will survive? You say 85 per cent at least,” said Dr Upton Allen, a Jamaican who heads the hospital’s infectious diseases unit and a co-director of the initiative.
“Ask the same question for a child who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and who might well be the cousin of somebody born in Toronto. The survival chances would probably be 50-50. A child born in St Vincent, perhaps St Lucia, one of the smaller countries in the Eastern Caribbean, it’s less than 50-50.”
Some key elements of the programme include the development of the Caribbean’s first children’s cancer registry. This will help physicians and scientists in Canada and the Caribbean track cancer sufferers from diagnosis and treatment to outcome. Just as important, it will enable Canadian and Caribbean experts to work collaboratively through telemedicine – the use of phone, Internet and high technology – to treat patients.
In addition, the project will:
• use the Paediatric Oncology Network Database called POND to track the progress of the young cancer sufferers. Canadian and Caribbean physicians would be able to measure how the children were responding to treatment.
• screen newborns for sickle-cell anaemia, a blood disorder that affects tens of thousands of black children in the Caribbean, Canada and the United States. The disease deprives tissues in the body of oxygen, causing pain, exhaustion and organ damage.
• provide consultation and diagnostic expertise to Barbados and the other countries.
• create a new services delivery model for pharmacy, diagnostics, nursing and laboratory services to improve cancer care access.
• update diagnostic services for cancer cases to ensure they are consistent with international standards.
“It is important to recognize the important role Canada and Sick Kids play in medical leadership in this [Western] Hemisphere,” said Allen.
Actually, Blanchette traced the idea for the programme to a young patient he treated in Toronto in the 1990s. The child was suffering from an acute form of leukaemia and the Bajan expert got to know the boy’s wealthy parents. They talked about how great it would be if there were a special effort in the Caribbean to treat children with leukaemia.
Incidentally, the youngster’s grandfather in Calgary had spent a considerable amount of time in Barbados.
Because of the treatment at the hands of Blanchette and others at Sick Kids, the boy, now a teenager, is free of leukaemia and his parents made a generous donation to the hospital’s foundation.
Both Blanchette and Allen insisted the plan wasn’t to transport Caribbean children to Canada for care. Instead, it would improve the level of treatment in the islands through “capacity building and infrastructure development”.
Blachette received his medical training at Cambridge University and St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Britain before going to Johns Hopkins Hospital in the United States, Canada’s McMaster University and Sick Kids hospital.
