The Prevention and Screening Innovation Project towards Elimination of Cervical Cancer (PRESCRIP-TEC) research project contributes to the evidence-base for the WHO strategy to eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem. The project implements an innovative approach in cervical cancer screening, including direct treatment and follow-up, for women in resource-poor or hard-to-reach settings, by improving availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of services. PRESCRIP-TEC focuses on implementation research into secondary prevention of cervical cancer in different settings in four countries over three continents: Bangladesh and India in Asia, Uganda in Africa, and Slovakia in Eastern Europe.

The project builds on interventions with promising or proven effectiveness including cost-effectiveness: - hrHPV based screening is cost-effective when adequate coverage is reached. - Self-swab for hrHPV leads to higher uptake of screening compared to sampling by clinicians. - Visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) is an approved screening method by the WHO and is part of the national cervical cancer prevention programme in Uganda, Bangladesh, India; in India AI to support VIA screening was shown to be effective in detecting VIA positive lesions. The following research questions will be answered per target country: 1. Which are the client-related factors for accessibility and acceptability and adherence to the enhanced screening protocol? 2. Which are the health system-related factors for availability and quality of the enhanced screening protocol? 3. What is the percentage of increase in coverage and uptake as result of implementation of the enhanced screening protocol? 4. What is the percentage of screened women who adhere to single-visit treatment and proposed follow-up of screening? 5. Does the artificial intelligence decision support system (AI-DSS) offer a solution for reducing intraobserver and inter-observer variation by HCWs and does it allow task shifting to non-specialist health staff? 6. At which level of unit cost per screening the new protocol (including self-test for hrHPV and AI-DSS) is affordable for the included countries?

Additional information related to article "Investigating feasibility..." is available from https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13488-z