SAN FRANCISCO-The American Society of Clinical Oncology set a goal for the inaugural Cancer Survivorship Symposium to draw 500 attendees, the meeting's Steering Committee Chair Kevin Oeffinger, MD, Director of the Adult Long-Term Follow-Up Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said during the meeting's closing session. The final tally was 835 attendees, according to ASCO. The goal for abstract submissions was 150; and the planning committee received 298 (with 268 being presented).
"The attendance and the number of submitted abstracts far exceeded what we expected-and I believe that speaks to the need for the conference. It speaks to the hunger out there on the part of the oncology and primary care communities to have a forum at which the state of the art can be presented and issues about cancer survivorship can be discussed," the meeting's Program Committee Chair Ann Partridge, MD, MPH, Director of the Adult Survivorship Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, said in an interview.
The 2016 Cancer Survivorship Symposium: Advancing Care and Research was the first meeting on the topic that was cosponsored by the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, and ASCO. There are plans to continue holding the meeting annually for the next four years.
"The key takeaway from the meeting is that cancer survivorship is a growing industry," Partridge added. "But cancer survivors have diverse and deep needs that we are increasingly figuring out how to address and improve.
"This meeting was very much needed-and I think the testament to that is the science and the quality of the speakers and the attendance. People came and listened and stayed. The room was never half empty; it was always over half full."
The Oncology-Primary Care Partnership
Commenting about the meeting in an interview for this article, Mary McCabe, RN, MA, Director of the Cancer Survivorship Initiative at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said that the partnerships across specialties made this meeting a significant one.
"The meeting was quite notable in the fact that it was really a formal acknowledgement of the partnership between oncology clinicians, both physicians and nurses, and internal medicine and family practitioners-and the fact that we share care of these patients and have mutual concerns about their future well beings," she said.
Each session at the meeting was co-moderated by a family practitioner or primary care provider as well as an oncologist.
"It was interesting to see that the oncology community and the primary care community are thinking very much alike about what services cancer survivors need and how to delineate the most efficient way of applying those services," McCabe said. "The meeting really showed a convergence, a common approach about how we think about care."
McCabe has previously chaired ASCO's Survivorship Committee, but she is no longer on that committee and was not the involved in the planning of this meeting-though she did present on the topic of "Models of Delivery" during a general session.
One of the most important takeaways, she added, was that the conversations at the meeting showed the shift away from just describing a variety of long-term effects of cancer treatments to more specific research and discussion about who might be at risk for those late effects and what types of interventions they may need-"really developing much more of an evidence base for our practice."
The one group that did seem to be missing though, she added, were clinicians and individuals working to provide care to survivors from minority and underserved populations.
Interesting Conversations In-person & Online
Though he did not attend the Symposium in person, Don S. Dizon, MD, FACP, Clinical Co-Director of Gynecologic Oncology and Director of The Oncology Sexual Health Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, said that the issues raised at the meeting sparked many interesting discussions on social media.
"That it was sponsored by primary care, family practice, and oncology, it was a real attempt to collaborate," Dizon said in an email. "After all, in survivorship, the goal is coordination of care. Having everyone in the room in this symposium really helps reinforce the message that we cannot do this alone (as a single specialty), but we can if we work together."
Going forward, he would like to see more inclusion of the various social media channels with what was happening at the live meeting, he said. And one specific topic that begged more discussion was terminology, he added.
"On Twitter, someone commented that in the U.K. they say 'patients with cancer' or 'patients treated for cancer,'" he explained. "I'd like to stop seeing cancer used as an adjective. It's a noun, and that's how it should be used.
"'Survivorship' is not a term universally embraced by those impacted [by cancer], and by those who care for patients living with cancer. ... I'd like to spur a conversation about terminology-maybe as a point of discussion at the next conference."
Defining a Goal
One potential concern was that the meeting may have tried to accomplish too much.
"This was a very successful meeting- no question about it," Patricia Ganz, MD, Distinguished Professor in the Schools of Medicine & Public Health at UCLA and Director of Cancer Prevention & Control Research at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, said in a phone interview for this article. "But I think it might take some time to figure out what the audience is and what the goals should be."
Ganz was not on the meeting's planning committee, but she did present on surveillance during one of the general sessions and she was a coauthor of an abstract presented at a poster presentation.
"Is the meeting really to foster improvements in clinical practice and collaboration between the practitioners who share this care? That's a great goal and there needs to be a forum for that to establish best practices and strategies to engage and coordinate care. ... Or is the meeting a forum to present the science and new research?" Ganz said. "Many of the abstracts were presented, but there was not time for the audience to ask questions about the methodologies and how the research was done."