American-Iraqi partnership in addressing high cancer incidence in children in Southern Iraq: Health and HOPE for the children of Iraq

Over the past two decades, health care in Iraq deteriorated from a first-world, high-tech system to that of a developing country. Childhood cancer incidence in Iraq is eight to ten times higher than in the West. Fifty-six percent of cancer cases in Iraq are in children under five and fifteen percent of Iraqi children do not live to their first birthday. In 2005, Project HOPE joined a public/private partnership to establish a new center of excellence in pediatric medicine, a referral hospital with a focus on Oncology, in the southern city of Basrah, now scheduled to open in January 2009. The Basrah Children's Hospital, the first new hospital built in over twenty-eight years, will provide a modern model for hospital design, functionality, organization, and training capabilities for the future. Project HOPE has been training Nurses, Physicians, and Ancillary professionals in the modern diagnoses and treatment of pediatric patients and is working with all the Hospital Directors to ensure that they will be ready to open the hospital. This paper will address the methods used for training, organizing, equipping, and facilitating the people of Iraq to open a modern health care facility, providing HOPE for the care of children in this beleaguered nation, addressing the most critical public health needs in southern Iraq.