Working towards healthier islands

Screening and treating in a single visit matters a great deal here. When a woman has to travel a long way to a clinic, asking her to come back weeks later for a result is often the point at which care is lost. Doing the test and the treatment on the same day removes that gap.

Because provincial staff have been trained to run the service themselves, the clinic is not a visiting activity that ends when partners leave. It is provincial capability, and it is the first phase of a longer effort to eliminate cervical cancer as a health problem in New Ireland.

The volunteers are the reason the plan can reach as far as it does. They live in the communities they serve, which means testing and treatment can happen in villages that are hours from the nearest health centre, and that prevention advice comes from a familiar voice rather than a visitor.

Working with PNGIMR gives the program the research and surveillance side it needs: understanding where transmission is still happening, and checking whether what we are doing is actually reducing it. Prevention, diagnosis, treatment and monitoring are treated as one effort rather than four separate ones.

Before the merger, hospital care and public health were run separately, with separate plans and separate budgets. Bringing them together means the team treating patients in Kavieng and the team running immunisation and outreach in the villages answer to the same leadership and pull in the same direction.

This is what makes the other programs possible. A clinic in Kavieng and a malaria volunteer in a coastal village belong to one system, which is also how the Authority holds itself to the National Health Plan and its theme, “Leaving No One Behind.”