TY - JOUR
AU - Kamita, Moses
AU - Bird, Peter
AU - Akinyi, Beryl
AU - Kamau, Rosemary Wangari
AU - Carter, Robert
AU - Muma, Sarah
AU - Adam, Mary
AU - Makori, Timothy
AU - Figueroa, Jonine D.
AU - Makokha, Francis
PY - 2023
DA - February
TI - Cancer referrals at African Inland Church Kijabe Hospital, Kiambu County (2014-2020) and the impact of COVID-19
JO - International Health 
DO - https://doi.org/10.1093/inthealth/ihad007
AB - In Kenya, cancer is the third leading cause of death. The African Inland Church Kijabe Hospital (AICKH) is a level 4 missionary hospital. The hospital serves the Kenyan population in many areas, including cancer care, and some of these services were affected during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We aimed to leverage a recently established hospital-based cancer registry of patients treated at AICKH between 2014 and 2020 to describe the cancer cases and patient referral patterns seen at AICKH during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. A cross-sectional retrospective survey was conducted through medical records abstraction in the surgery, breast clinic, palliative care and pathology departments. A total of 3279 cases were included in the study, with females accounting for 58.1% of the cases. The top-three cancers overall were breast (23.0%), oesophagus (20.5%) and prostate (8.6%). There was a minimal increase in the number of cancer cases in 2020 (1.7%) compared with 2019, with an increase of 19.3% in 2019 compared with 2018. In conclusion, AICKH is one of the few hospitals in Kenya where a large number of cancer patients seek healthcare, and referral of cancer cases changed in 2020, which may be due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Future efforts can leverage this registry to determine the impacts of cancer diagnosis and treatment on survival outcomes.
PB - Oxford University Press
UR - https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/ed94eea6-69c3-43c6-93fd-68acafb4e932
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
KW - Hospital care
ER