Committed to serve

In India, cancer care and treatment pose multiple challenges. The biggest is access to good quality and affordable treatment, especially for those in rural areas. The severe shortage of diagnostic facilities and screening programmes makes matters worse.

The Tata Trusts have been working for long to ease these problems, beginning with the setting up in 1941 of the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai.

Just as important as infrastructure-building support has been a potentially transformative cancer care initiative that is at once singular and inclusive, comprehensive and strikingly effective. In the works since 2017 and now at various stages of rollout in seven states, the initiative is built on four pillars: accessibility; high-quality treatment; affordability; and awareness, early detection and palliative care. Put it all together and you have the ‘distributed model of cancer care’.

The distributed care model includes a network of centres that offer day-care facilities, onco-pathology labs, screening kiosks and 20 hospitals across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Gujarat. The network is being expanded in collaboration with the respective state governments and other stakeholders.