Introduction:

Breast cancer represents an increasing public health issue in Colombia. Most undergraduate medical students and health professionals do not receive training in early detection of breast cancer.

Material and methods:

This article describes the process and achievements developed by the National Cancer Institute of Colombia (NCIC) to train health professionals (general practitioners [GP], gynecologists, family doctors and chief nurses) in early detection of breast cancer through two modalities courses: physical presence and virtual.

Results:

With these two course modalities 1,875 health professionals have been trained, most of them were certified through the virtual course (n=1.294; 73,.0 %). Most of the trained health professionals were GP (n=919; 49,0 %). Both modalities had a high level of satisfaction of the participants, a certification rate of 100 % in the face-to-face modality and 73.0 % in the virtual one.

Conclusions:

It is difficult to measure the impact of professional training in the clinical staging of breast cancer mainly because most regions in Colombia do not have cancer records. We should have a longer follow-up time to be able to measure the real impact in achieving lower clinical staging and, therefore, to reduce mortality due to the disease.

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