Pediatric cancers and family financial toxicity in the Philippines: insights for Southeast Asia and similarly resourced settings.

Cancer is a leading cause of death among children in the Philippines, a low-middle-income country of over 110 million people. In this Comment, we describe how financial toxicity affects families of pediatric patients with cancer in the Philippines. We explore direct costs of care, indirect costs such as transportation and lodging, and psychosocial sequelae, in the Filipino medical system and sociocultural contexts.

To Chemo or Not to Chemo… That Is the Question.

The best practices and clinical consensus statements often differ from real-world practice.

Achieving health equity in cancer care in the Philippines.

Notwithstanding the progress made across the cancer care continuum, a major problem that many patients with cancer experience is the difficulty of access to global standards of care. Awareness of this problem has been increasing most especially when the economic context of a country forces health systems to deliver quality care despite the rising costs of diagnostic and therapeutic innovations amidst limited resources. Ultimately, inappropriate delivery of care to patients with cancer contributes to inadequate and unequal access to high-value therapy increasing financial toxicity among patients.

Geographic Distribution of Cancer Care Providers in the Philippines.

Purpose: In the Philippines, a lower middle-income country in Southeast Asia, 6 of 10 Filipinos die without seeing a doctor. To ensure universal access to cancer care, providers must be equitably distributed. Therefore, we evaluated the distribution of oncologists across all 17 regions in the Philippines.

Cancer clinical trials in the Philippines.

In this Commentary, we discuss disparities in resources for and access to cancer trials from the perspective of the Philippines, a lower-middle-income country in Southeast Asia, where cancer is the fourth leading cause of death. Geographic disparities play out such that academic institutions and clinical trials are centralized in the island of Luzon, particularly in the capital, Manila. These disparities are compounded by the lack of comprehensive cancer patient and clinical trial registries in the Philippines.

Follicular Dendritic Cell Sarcoma of the Tonsil: A Multimodality Approach.

Follicular dendritic cell sarcoma (FDCS) accounts for < 0.4% of soft tissue sarcomas. Only 35 cases of tonsillar FDCS have been reported, and majority had localized presentation.

The Last Request.

This essay is a personal reflection highlighting the importance of spirituality in the care of cancer patients and their families especially at the end-of-life.

Treatment Outcomes of Patients With Colorectal Cancer Enrolled in a Comprehensive Benefits Program of the National Insurance System in the Philippines: Data From the Pilot Site.

Purpose: Cancer treatment causes significant financial burden, especially in developing countries such as the Philippines. This led the Philippine Department of Health to create the Z-Package colorectal cancer benefit program, an insurance system specifically designed to treat Filipinos with colorectal cancers with early to locally advanced-stage disease. The main goal of this program is to optimize treatment outcomes for this curable disease without causing financial toxicity.