Residents Win Award for HPV Vaccine Initiative

In November, we featured an article detailing the advocacy efforts made by our residents for the HPV vaccine. Today we are proud to announce that this incredible initiative has been presented with an award from the Society of Gynecologic Oncology of Canada (GOC) and Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada(SOGC). Read more below from one of the residents who was a part of this initiative.

Written by: Dr. Emily Delpero, PGY3 with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology

We are thrilled to receive the GOC-SOGC’s “Most Innovative and Unique Project” for our efforts in this year’s GOC-SOGC Health Advocacy Challenge.

At Dr. Emma Skolnik’s instigation, six third-year residents (Alisha Olsthoorn, Jessica Smith, Chelsie Warshafsky, Emily Delpero and Sara Porisky) addressed HPV Vaccination awareness and access through a multifaceted campaign targeting individual knowledge gaps, systemic inequity and public health policy. We initially set out to educate and vaccinate university students, but found significant road blocks related to cost and university insurance coverage, which is tied to provincial policy dictating which patients are eligible to receive the vaccine. As a group we felt that simply addressing university students directly regarding a prohibitively expensive ($600) vaccine would not allow us to contribute to the SOGC mandate of eradicating cervical cancer. We needed a policy change at the university and provincial level.

Ultimately, we aimed to address the gap we identified between populations currently eligible for publicly funded vaccines and the at-risk populations outlined in the SOGC best-practice recommendations; public health policy ultimately disadvantages those of lower socioeconomic status and exposes them to higher cervical cancer risk. In order to tackle policy change, we reached out to different departments and obtained support from 450 physicians from over 10 specialties. Our open letter and petition was circulated widely, with hundreds of interactions on various social media platforms. Thus, what started with a large sparkling vulva painting in Robarts Library for university students to decorate with cyto brushes became a widespread advocacy campaign. Our initiative was a grassroots, interdisciplinary and multi-level operation that allowed us to collaborate and begin to develop and exercise our skills in advocacy work. We harnessed the broad range of our creative tools beginning with an artistic and educational installation, evolving to meetings with student government and widely circulated petitions to recruit support from our physician colleagues.

We are pleased to share that we are building on our momentum in a few important ways: collaborating with the SOGC resident committee to develop a national strategy to advocate for equitable access to the HPV vaccine for all at-risk Canadians; authoring letters with the support of the SOGC to recruit MPs to our cause; and engaging with the Ministry of Health to hold them accountable for policy decisions that continue to affect our most vulnerable populations.

Join us in our initiative! You can find our petition here!

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If you would like to be a guest blogger, please contact us at obgyn@utoronto.ca.