National Cancer Grid: a model for collaboration in cancer care and research

Abstract

The National Cancer Grid (NCG) is a network of major cancer centres, research institutes, patient groups and charitable institutions across India with the mandate of establishing uniform standards of patient care for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, providing specialized training and education in oncology and facilitating collaborative basic, translational and clinical research in cancer. The strength of NCG is in the number of cancer cases being treated at the partner centre, constituting 70% of all cancer cases in India. To fulfil the objective of uniform cancer care, a multipronged approach is being followed. NCG has developed guidelines for the management of common cancers in India. These guidelines are in an easy to follow the algorithmic format and based on the available evidence in the literature. To further enhance the cancer care, several steps have been taken to build a pool of trained health care professionals, quality assurance program in pathology, availability of virtual tumour board, second opinion services and institutional peer review to name a few. NCG is evaluating the feasibility of patient health record integration to provide ownership of the data to the patient and facilitate seamless care across the centres. This will become a rich resource to conduct real-world data-based research in near-future. An important focus of NCG has been multi-centric collaborative cancer research addressing questions which are unique to our country and aim to develop cost-effective therapeutics. NCG not only provides the funding for the multi-centric research but also trains the oncologists and the allied specialists in research methodologies through annual research methodology workshop. Given the similarities of challenges in other Low middle-income countries in the field of cancer care, NCG model can be expanded to other countries too. The Centre for Global health is being planned to fulfil these needs.