The mobile phone as a tool in improving cancer care in Nigeria

Abstract

Low resource countries faced with the burden of cancer care, poor patient follow-up and poor psychosocial support can cash in on this to overcome the persistent problem of poor communication in their healthcare delivery. The potential is enormous to enhance the use of mobile phones in novel ways: developing helpline numbers that can be called for cancer information from prevention to treatment to palliative care. The ability to reach out by mobile phone to a reliable source for medical information about cancer is something that the international community, having experience with helplines, should undertake with colleagues in Africa, who are experimenting with the mobile phone potential.

Long-term follow-up is possible for short-term surgical trips

“…Given these challenges, the utilization of mobile phones to coordinate patient follow-up has been investigated in various rural, resource-poor settings, including Haiti [7,8,[10][11][12]. Haiti has an estimated 62% mobile phone ownership rate, and 86% of our operative patients had mobile phone numbers recorded.…”

“…However, obtaining long-term follow-up of patients is challenging for STSMs-and there are few descriptions of the methods used to achieve such follow-up and even fewer reports of clinical outcomes-making determination of their success challenging [3,6]. Achieving patient follow-up is challenging even for established hospital systems in rural, resource-poor settings where STSMs often function, but there is evidence that mobile phones may enhance patient follow-up in such settings, including rural Haiti [7][8][9][10][11][12]. The aim of this study was two-fold: 1) to evaluate the efficacy of mobile phones to facilitate long-term patient follow-up (> one year) among a cohort of STSM patients in rural Haiti and 2) to measure longterm surgical outcomes, particularly late postoperative complications (POC) and the impact of operations upon patient quality of life (QOL), not measurable in the perioperative period.…”

The state of mHealth development and use by palliative care services in sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review of the literature

“…As charted in figure 1, following record screening and full text assessment, five articles were included in the review 11 30 31 32 33. Our assessment of titles and abstracts identified no non-English papers that met the inclusion criteria.…”

Trends, Findings, and Opportunities: An Archival Review of Health Information Systems Research in Nigeria

“…Several further observations can be made on the approach taken in the existing studies. First, a broad range of health issues have been covered including sexual and reproductive health, maternal care (Ishola & Chipps, 2015;Odetola, 2015;Ezenwa & Brooks, 2013), antenatal care (Jennings et al, 2015), Ebola (Otu, Ebenso, Okuzu, & Osifo-Dawodu, 2016), and cancer (Mac Kenzie et al, 2016;Odigie et al, 2012). Several studies focus on educating health professionals or patients on important health issues such as sexual and reproductive health (Akinfaderin-Agarau et al, 2012), Ebola (Otu et al, 2016), and antenatal care (Jennings et al, 2015), while others explore the barriers facing health technology implementation (Benson, 2011a, Ayeni & Misra, 2014.…”

“…Many studies utilized technology in a simple manner using mobile devices merely as a mechanism for communication with oncologists via phone (Odigie et al, 2012), or with patients via SMS (Modrek et al, 2014) and video messages (Biruklia et al, 2016). For these studies, the emphasis was not on the technology but the health service or the message in question.…”