Meet the Bradford doctor helping government in Mauritius to set up cancer screening programme to help save lives

The consultant gastroenterologist, based at Bradford Royal Infirmary (BRI), has spent more than a decade returning to his home nation to support officials with the development of endoscopy services. Now, he’s helping the Government there to set up a national colon cancer screening programme which aims to save lives.

Colorectal cancer is the second most common cancer in men and the third most common in women in the Indian Ocean island – it currently has a 50 per cent mortality rate. “This screening programme will bring benefit in terms of decreasing the number of people with colon cancers and decreasing the number of people dying with colon cancers,” Dr Moreea says. “But we will only see that in about seven or eight years time.”

It’s been a long road to get to this point, Dr Moreea explains. His involvement began back in 2007 when he met the country’s then Prime Minister Dr Navinchandra Ramgoolam, as he paid a visit to The Yorkshire Clinic. As well as his work at BRI, Dr Moreea works at the private hospital in Bingley, where Dr Ramgoolam also spent time during his medical career. “I was going to Mauritius twice a year to see my family and he asked me whether I’d be keen to give some lectures there because he knew that the level of medicine was not the same in Mauritius as it was in the UK,” Dr Moreea says. "I said I know there’s a problem with endoscopy in Mauritius and I would much prefer to teach endoscopy.”

From 2008, Dr Moreea, who studied medicine through a scholarship scheme at the University of Leeds, began delivering endoscopy workshops to medical staff in Mauritius, supported by doctor and nurse colleagues from the UK. He says: “We have now got to a position where we have developed endoscopy units at all five hospitals, with trained doctors able to carry out procedures, so we now have a good service. In 2008, doctors carried our endoscopies on 250 patients, compared to last year where they conducted 6,000, and we were now in a position where the first generation of endoscopists are now teaching new doctors in this skill.”

Dr Moreea, who back in 2014 was awarded the equivalent of a knighthood in Mauritius for his efforts, adds: “If you go back to 2008-9 and someone came in vomiting blood or with pain in their tummy or having bloody diarrhoea, they couldn’t be treated in the public hospital. They would have to go and pay for private treatment. Now, all of this, everything that pertains to gastroenterology and endoscopy is provided in the five hospitals free at the point of delivery. That’s a big, big change for the population.”

In 2014, an oncologist visited Dr Moreea while he was in Mauritius and revealed that experts had noticed an increase in colon cancer. What was needed was a national screening programme so cases could be picked up early, but at the time the country didn’t have enough highly trained endoscopists or units set up to launch it. Dr Moreea explains: “By 2021 I felt the island’s doctors were sufficiently proficient to be ready to start setting up a colon cancer screening which will help catch bowel cancer in the early stages when it is treatable and potentially curable.”

Dr Moreea and five NHS experts in colon cancer screening in the UK helped to advise the Government in Mauritius on how best to proceed. A two-day conference took place in September and brought together 100 dignitaries, including the current Prime Minister of Mauritius, and representatives from its health service and government, including doctors, biochemists, healthcare managers and civil servants.

Each member of the UK delegation presented on different elements of the colon screening programme in England. They also spent a day visiting local hospitals to see the how the current endoscopy facilities could be best implemented in a new colon cancer screening service. It is hoped the first patient can be screened in November 2023.

Dr Moreea says: “I feel I have the opportunity to make things better for my country of birth so I have invested a lot of time and effort into this. In this country we are very lucky we have fantastic equipment, fantastic systems and sometimes we need to transfer that knowledge to less developed countries and that’s what I do.”