SEVERAL YEARS ago, when Radha’s teenaged daughter suddenly lost her hearing, she knocked on the doors of all hospitals she had heard of, including AIIMS in Delhi. When no doctor could help, Radha says, she got so frustrated that she burnt all the medical reports.
Last Friday, Radha joined several women from Morna village in Uttar Pradesh at the cancer screening clinic run by an ICMR institute in Noida. She had been told her breasts and “lower parts” will be checked but that’s not really why she agreed. She was hoping to come across a doctor who will get her daughter’s hearing back.
Since 2014, the Health Promotion Clinic (HPC) at the National Institute of Cancer Prevention and Research (NICPR) in Sector 39 has conducted cancer screening for nearly 7,500 people from neighbouring villages.
The clinic’s name has been kept deliberately ambiguous so as not to scare people away with the dreaded ‘C’ word. The hook in most cases is not cancer, it’s weight or any other health issue of concern. And, the idea is to then gradually counsel them into cancer screening, say doctors at the clinic. The clinic is a part of the government’s universal cancer screening scheme in 100 districts.
Read more of this effort in a story by Abantika Ghosh published in The Indian Express....
