4th symposium on primary breast cancer in older women. Theme: putting personalized care into practice (Held: 3 March 2017)

Abstract

This is the only meeting of its kind in the UK, now held biennially, aiming at a multidisciplinary audience, including patients, their carers and advocates. With a theme on 'Putting personalising care into practice', this Symposium included sessions on 'local and systemic therapies', 'new ideas', 'patients and carers', and 'challenging areas', covered by an international and local faculty, interviewing patients and carers, and abstract presentations. Topics covered were practical and wide-ranging, including selectng for chemotherapy, radiotherapy and breast reconstruction, treating HER2-positive disease, and the roles of the geriatrician and geriatric oncology nurse.Keywords: breast cancer • geriatric oncology • older women • primary breast cancer • symposiumThe symposium began with a welcome and introduction from Kwok-Leung Cheung (Clinical Associate Professor, University of Nottingham, Consultant Breast Surgeon, Royal Derby Hospital; UK National Representative, International Society of Geriatric Oncology [SIOG], Symposium co-chair). Cheung began by extending a warm welcome to everyone to the East Midlands Conference Centre and the University of Nottingham. He explained how the symposium, first started in 2010, began in a very small room in the postgraduate education center in City Hospital, Nottingham, with only about 20-30 people in attendance. He was pleased to say that things had certainly moved on, and the biennial symposium was now a multidisciplinary event with an emphasis on patient perspectives, as a direct response to delegate feedback ranking patient sessions the best! The symposium has continuous professional development accreditation from the Royal Colleges and is basically the only event in the country to be dedicated to a multidisciplinary focus on older women with primary breast cancer. Cheung was also happy to announce that since the event is under the auspices of SIOG, senior members of SIOG will be speaking and presenting also.Since the previous symposium, organizers have been giving a theme to the event, this year's theme being, 'Putting personalized care into practice', with an emphasis on the word 'personalizing', since it is well known that older women with primary breast cancer tend to be under-or overtreated sometimes due to a lack of knowledge and other times due to over enthusiasm or failure to include them in clinical trials. Also based on requests and feedback from previous conferences, Cheung explained the addition of a 'students and patient advocates' category at registration for the conference to encourage their attendance.The speaker list went beyond just oncological representations of surgeons and oncologists, including an epidemiologist and a geriatrician from the previous symposium and in the 2015 event, the geriatrician being particularly inspiring -especially for the UK delegates, since it is not really a standard practice in the UK to include a geriatrician in the care of older women with primary breast cancer. For the first time, there was a geriatric oncology nurse in th...