Chisinau, 2018 – 120 specialists from Primary Health Care institutions from all regions of the country participated, between September 20 and October 3, 2018, in a training course on Cervical Screening. They improved their communication and counseling skills for women eligible for screening, as well as their cytological test collection techniques for cervical cancer prevention.
“If a woman ends up dying from cervical cancer, it means that a good part of the blame lies with the medical worker, who did not do everything possible to find and test her. Cervical cancer is the only form of cancer that can be easily prevented by performing the cervical screening test,” says Ludmila Bologan, an obstetrician-gynecologist, one of the trainers in the training program.
Cervical screening is performed every three years for all women aged 25-61 and is free of charge when visiting a family doctor. Medical workers in family doctor’s offices are responsible for organizing the screening process by inviting women of eligible age, taking cytological tests, informing them about the test results and recalling them for screening in three years, if no pre-cancerous lesions have been detected, or referring them to the next stages of investigation, with monitoring of the diagnostic and treatment process.
Alexandra Anghelova is a midwife at the Health Center in Avdarma village, Comrat district. She says that the hardest part of this process is convincing women to come for screening and gaining their trust. Because of their mentality, some women come too late, which is why the counseling and communication techniques I learned during the training are very useful for me,” she says. Diana Valuta, Head of the Cervical Screening Coordination Unit, mentions that in the Republic of Moldova, increasingly important steps are being taken to improve the quality of cervical screening and cervical cancer prevention services.
In the Republic of Moldova, cervical cancer continues to affect about 300 women per year, most of them aged 35-45. In September this year, over 1,200 women, experts and medical workers participated in a sociological study to understand the causes of not going to the doctor for cervical screening and to intervene more effectively to eliminate them.
The activities are part of the project “Prevention of Cervical Cancer in the Republic of Moldova”, carried out by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Social Protection, the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the International Association for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer (ICCA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and other development partners.
