Local team to help in study on how people access Cancer care in the region
ST LUCIAN PROFESSOR Aviane Auguste, who launched an epidemiological study called, ‘The Cancer in Small Island Developing States of the Eastern Caribbean(CaSIDEC) to investigate the effects of overseas travel for care on patient-centered outcomes in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) countries, intends to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with caregivers and cancer survivors later this year.
Auguste hosted a research seminar on Friday, January 15, 2026 called, ‘Cancer across our islands: what we are learning from the CaSIDEC study and why the evidence matters.’
The study includes participants who are 18 years and older, and is being done in the study design of the 2019-2020 ‘Retrospective cohort of cancer survivors.’
At the seminar, Auguste highlighted the data that the research has garnered so far, particularly in St Lucia. He said that his team hopes to establish a cohort of 650 Caribbean adult survivors of any type of cancer over a three year period.
He also hopes to conduct pilot interviews and focus groups later this year with cancer survivors and caretakers.
Auguste added that the study will “identify priority areas that need to be addressed to optimise cancer care”, and initiate an “iImportant first-step to build research resources to study cancer epidemiology in small Caribbean islands”.
He added that his team consists of a project steering committee, including co-lead for the CaSIDEC study in SVG Tami Williams and President of SCORCH Cancer Support Foundation, Dr. Jozelle Miller.
Auguste explained that this committee is responsible for the generation of new data for the CaSIDEC study, knowledge synthesis such as literature reviews, and knowledge translation.
He said that preliminary results have revealed that patients across the member countries have found that social support from family, friends, and governing entities has made the treatment process for cancer much easier on patients.
Auguste also presented his research on WEFm and said that scientific literature has shown that there’s a lot of interesting features of accessing care on an island that seems very different from Europe, the United States or Canada.
“The idea of this study is to gain a broader understanding of how persons access care for cancer within the region….The particular act of the CaSIDEC study is that we’re going to go really in depth, and try to understand what we consider to be medical travel for cancer care.”
Auguste said that he can only imagine that people in St Vincent and the Grenadines are accustomed to the phenomenon where a clinician at the local hospital mentions a specialised surgery or care that is not available in the country, causing patients to travel either to the United States or Trinidad to seek that care.
“And so this is a feature of small and developing states like ours, our own here in OECS, which we don’t see elsewhere, at least not at this volume” he said, adding that his team is interested in finding out how this could affect the bottom line for patients.
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