Cost and cost-effectiveness of paediatric cancer treatment: results from three countries

Until now there have been no cost and cost-effectiveness studies of paediatric cancer centres in any country.  Existing studies examine cost and cost-effectiveness for individual paediatric cancers, but omit major cost components.  As an input to the Lancet Oncology Commission on Paediatric Oncology, we have worked with colleagues in countries with very different levels of income to obtain comprehensive data. We will present results for two completed studies for cancer centres in El Salvador, and Ghana, both lower-middle income countries. In addition, we will present micro costing results pertaining to the treatment of Burkitts Lymphoma in Uganda. Although there are issues of affordability, paediatric cancer treatment in these settings is very cost-effective.  The results have policy importance given ongoing efforts to cost strategies for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals in health.

A copy of one of the papers to be presented is available here.

Sumit Gupta is a Staff Oncologist at the Hospital for Sick Children, and Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. He led the childhood cancer section of the Disease Control Priorities Project, and has worked extensively with paediatric oncologists in the Caribbean, Central America, and China. He is Assistant Chair of the Lancet Oncology Commission on Sustainable Paediatric Cancer Care, which will be launched in September 2018. 

Sue Horton is Professor of Global Health Economics in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, and the Department of Economics, at University of Waterloo.  She is well known for her work on economics of nutrition in low- and middle-income countries.  More recently she co-edited the Disease Control Priorities volume on Cancer and is lead author of one of the three papers in a forthcoming Lancet series on Pathology and Laboratory Medicine in low- and middle-income countries.  She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.