Dr Lisa Stevens - NCI, Bethesda, USA
Could you tell us about the ICCP?
It’s the International Cancer Control Partners and what we sought to do a little over four years ago was to bring together organisations, both UN, NGOs, others, who were interested in cancer control and find a common purpose and a common goal in terms of working with countries and their teams to develop national cancer control plans.
What can the partnership offer people working on cancer control plans?
We have developed over the years an excellent portal and some of the key features of the portal are publically available cancer control plans as well as NCD plans, so non-communicable disease plans. We really hope that developed cancer control plans will link and be integrated into NCD plans. In addition there’s the ability to request technical assistance and so a country who is struggling or wants information on how to develop an implementation plan can request a specific type of technical assistance and then the partners work together to determine who may have a vested interest in a particular country and can provide that assistance.
Dr Brenda Kostelecky - NCI, Bethesda, USA
We held a cancer control leadership forum with the partnership in central Asia about a year ago and have provided some follow-up technical assistance to the central Asian countries since then. Of the five countries that participated three have developed plans and have started to implement activities on those plans.
Currently there are over 20 organisations linked with the partnership, what roles do they provide?
We have a number of different organisations that are from pretty diverse sectors so we have some of the multilateral organisations, we have civil society, national government, professional societies and they contribute a lot of different things. Some of the professional societies help to contribute things like resource stratified guidelines and guidance on how to use those. We at NCI help support information on evidence based cancer control planning and how to incorporate the results of research into cancer control planning and implementation and also how to strengthen research programmes so that countries can do their own research to find out what’s going to work best in their context. We have other organisations like civil society organisations who help countries understand how advocates can play a role in the cancer control planning process.
Aside from central Asia, what other regions are being approached?
We’ve had cancer control leadership forums recently in Central America and Latin America as well as one in the Caribbean so we’re re-engaging with a lot of those regions as we provide technical assistance and follow up leadership forums.
