Ethical Approval and Consent to participate
The SABCHO study was approved by the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (Approval Number: Ml50351, dated: 6th May 2015, recertified M1911203 dated 28 January 2020), the University of KwaZulu-Natal Biomedical Research Committee, BF080/15, and the Institutional Review Board of Columbia University (protocol number AAAQ1359, dated 1st January 2016).
Consent for publication
The authors affirm that the research participants provided informed consent for publication of their de-identifiable data.
Availability of supporting data
This study contains confidential patient information; requests for de-identified data that support the results reported in this article may be made to the corresponding author.
Competing interests
The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests.
Where authors are identified as personnel of the International Agency for Research on Cancer or World Health Organization, the authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in this article and they do not necessarily represent the decisions, policy or views of these organisations.
Funding
This study was funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (Grant Number NCI 1R01CA192627 to JSJ, MJ, AIN and PR and NCI 3P30CA13696 to AIN), and the University of Witwatersrand/South African Medical Research Council (University of the Witwatersrand Common Epithelial Cancer Research Centre Grant to PR). Authors WM and SAN are supported by the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Authors’ contributions
WM - Made substantial contributions to the conception; design of the work; acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; drafted the work and substantively revised it.
SAN - Made substantial contributions to the conception; design of the work; acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; drafted the work and substantively revised it.
AC - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
OAA - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
WCC - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
JSJ - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
AIN - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
PR - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
HC - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
DSO - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
IB - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
SC - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
LWS - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
HAF - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
SN - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
BP - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
TC - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
VAM - Made substantial contributions acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; and substantively revised the work.
MJ - Made substantial contributions to the conception; design of the work; acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data; drafted the work and substantively revised it.
All the authors approved the submitted version and they agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the teams at the hospitals for their dedicated and diligent service to patients, capturing and entering of data. We thank the patients who provided the data that we utilised in this study and the importance of this data in informing the improvement of our health system.