Project BELIEVE Helps Indian Cancer Patients
In 1996-1997 at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., an Indian doctor on sabbatical made quite an impression on Edward Shaw, M.D., Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology. Stan Macaden, M.D., spent his year at Wake Forest learning about their hospice program in hopes of creating something similar for his home institution, Bangalore Baptist Hospital in Bangalore India.

The more he found himself in the company of Dr. Macaden, the more Dr. Shaw was intrigued by the practice of medicine in India. “We soon found that we had something in common,” said Dr. Shaw. “A desire to see the cancer needs of the poor met regardless of race or religion.”

Dr. Macaden is the former director and CEO of Bangalore Baptist, a 160-bed hospital that sees approximately 100,000 outpatients and 10,000 inpatients each year — the majority of them are urban and rural poor, and a growing number are cancer patients. Bangalore is the fifth largest city in India, with just over 8 million people and more than 7,000 are diagnosed with cancer each year — just a fraction of the estimated 800,000 new cases annually diagnosed throughout India.

Dr. Shaw was so moved by the plight of Indian cancer patients that he made his first of two trips to Bangalore and the suburban and rural areas that surround the southern Indian city in 1999. He spent a week visiting cancer centers and radiation therapy departments across the region and determined that there was an overarching need for additional radiation therapy services for cancer patients.

According to Dr. Shaw, most of the cancer patients in India have locally advanced or metastatic disease when they are diagnosed, so they are treated primarily with palliative radiation therapy. Aside from late diagnosis, the main problem is the dearth of radiation oncology facilities throughout India. The fortunate who are able to access healthcare can afford to take advantage of the five private hospitals that offer radiation therapy in Bangalore. The poor are forced into government-run hospitals that are understaffed, under equipped and overrun with patients.

“The entire country, with more than 1 billion people, has fewer linear accelerators than the state of North Carolina. Bangalore, with a population of more than 8 million, has fewer linear accelerators than Winston-Salem, a city of just under 200,000 people,” said Dr. Shaw. “The majority of the people who cannot afford healthcare die from cancer before they are ever diagnosed or treated.”

Sensing the need for better access to cancer care, Dr. Shaw decided to act. During his last trip to Bangalore in January 2004, Dr. Shaw and Dr. Macaden along with Santosh Benjamin, M.D., the current director and CEO, put into motion a plan to develop a radiation oncology department at Bangalore Baptist. With the hospital leadership, Drs. Shaw, Macaden and Benjamin established Project BELIEVE in the hopes of raising $600,000 to fund the building, equipping and staffing of the department, which would see an estimated 2,000 cancer patients during the first five years it would be open. A donor in India provided the lead gift of $125,000, and North Carolina Baptist Hospital Foundation gave $200,000. The goal is to raise the remainder of the money by the end of 2006.

The hope is to construct a linear accelerator vault and attached facility that would include exam rooms, offices, a simulator room and a brachytherapy suite. One of the challenges with catering to the poor is that many of the patients do not have the means to travel from their homes to the hospital each day for treatment. Project BELIEVE includes a plan to build a housing facility where these patients can stay so they can receive their full course of treatment and also receive the nutritional and psychological care they need.

“Hopefully, this will help address the need for low-cost, charity radiation therapy services in this region,” said Dr. Shaw. “The hospital is seeing a growing number of cancer patients and provides surgical oncology and medical oncology, so this is a natural progression.”

For more information on this program, please contact Dr. Shaw at eshaw@wfubmc.edu.