Jhpiego’s Single Visit Approach discussed in Reproductive Health Matters

Jhpiego's approach for detecting and treating pre-cancerous lesions of the cervix during a single visit to a trained provider, usually a nurse or midwife, has proved to be a cost effective and sustainable solution for the prevention of cancer of the cervix in low-resource countries. The single visit approach (SVA) combines testing and treatment in one visit, an important advantage in developing nations where access to high quality services remains a challenge.

In the most recent edition of Reproductive Health Matters, Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, Jhpiego Vice President and Medical Director and colleagues, published a substantive report entitled “Cervical cancer screening using visual inspection with acetic acid: operational experiences from Ghana and Thailand”  that details how these two nations have continued to provide high quality and effective cervical cancer prevention services many years after donor assistance has ended.  Most developing countries have been unable to introduce and scale up use of pap test because the test must be performed at specialized laboratories, and confirmation of pre-cancer requires visit to a specialist and further tests. The SVA depends on detection of lesions using ordinary vinegar, followed by immediate treatment if lesions are seen.

“Based on our findings, we recommend all low-resource nations consider investing in SVA to control cervical cancer,” said Dr. Sanghvi.  “Each year more than 250,000 women living in the world’s most challenged countries die from cervical cancer; Jhpiego believes we can save their lives today. Ghana and Thailand’s commitment to Jhpiego’s approach has proven that women can live healthy, productive lives if they have access to quality, low-cost preventative treatment.”

A summary of the paper is available here.

As Vice President & Medical Director of Jhpiego, Dr. Sanghvi is responsible for leading the organization’s technical and clinical approaches by designing and implementing effective, low-cost, hands-on solutions to strengthen the delivery of health care services for women and their families. He has extensive experience assisting more than 25 low-resource countries to adopt evidence based guidelines, design training systems, develop health trainers and leaders, scale up training programs, and seek innovative solutions to improve the performance of health services for women. For the last fifteen years, he has led the global effort in expanding emergency obstetric care, as well as seeking solutions for preventing post-partum hemorrhage and cervical cancer in low resource settings.

About Jhpiego
For 35 years, Jhpiego, (pronounced "ja-pie-go"), has empowered front-line health workers by designing and implementing simple, low-cost, hands-on solutions that strengthen the delivery of health care services, following the household-to-hospital continuum of care. We partner with community- to national-level organizations to build sustainable, local capacity through advocacy, policy and guidelines development, and quality and performance improvement approaches.