Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Treating cervical cancer as soon as possible is important. Shorter waiting times may improve treatment results. Delayed treatment can reduce a person's quality of life and result in disease progression. When cancer grows, it requires treatments that have more negative side effects. These treatments can be expensive and often do not work as well. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women across the world. We aren't certain why delaying treatment affects patients' cervical cancer survival. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the issue of treatment delay. Many countries have needed to delay non-emergency cancer treatments because they don't have enough resources. To address this, our study is trying to develop guidelines for how to study treatment delays. We are also trying to determine the association between delaying cervical cancer treatment and survival in both Canada and the sub-Saharan country Botswana. This study will begin by meeting with cancer and research experts to develop guidelines for running treatment delay studies. Once developed, these guidelines will be used to guide studies in Canada and Botswana looking at how treatment delay in patients with cervical cancer affects their survival. These will provide complimentary studies because Canada and Botswana have different health systems and length of waiting times. We will measure treatment delay from diagnosis to the start of treatment. This study will help address an important global women's health equity issue that isn't well researched. Understanding how treatment delay affects patient survival is essential for designing strong health systems, care pathways, and models of care. The results of this study will be used to help make decisions about cervical cancer treatment. It will also inform policies on who should get treatment priority for cervical cancer treatment in Canadian and Botswanan settings.