August 2018
The VCCC has demonstrated a strong and clear commitment to consumer engagement since its inception. We have sought to capture the voices of consumers – members of the community with a lived experience of cancer as a patient or carer. And we have tried to make this a meaningful practice: listening carefully to the unique and crucial point-of-view that consumers bring; incorporating those voices into decisions that have shaped our growth and informed our strategic approach to advancing cancer research, education and clinical care.
As the work of the VCCC grows and evolves, it is timely for us to review and refine our consumer engagement. This is a priority for the VCCC and I believe our effectiveness as an organisation will be enhanced through integrating best practice methods for engaging consumers in all aspects of our work.
The VCCC Consumer Engagement Action Plan will provide a comprehensive model and implementation plan to guide our efforts in this area. It draws on the Cancer Australia National Framework for Consumer Involvement in Cancer Control.
Best practice consumer engagement is everyone’s business. You may be a consumer yourself. You may have worked with consumers extensively or it may be a new practice for you. What is clear, is that the responsibility for making consumer engagement work in a meaningful way rests with all of us.
I invite you to take the opportunity to have a say in this important work by reviewing the draft VCCC consumer engagement vision and model. This will be available later this month, to register your interest in this review process, please email Alison Coughlan at [email protected]. We would very much like to hear from you.
I recently reviewed DHHS Pancreatic Cancer in Victoria – Optimal care pathway data summary report compiled from data prepared for the Pancreatic Cancer Summit convened by Victorian Integrated Cancer Services in November last year. The summit was attended by 70 stakeholders from across Victoria to engage in a statewide assessment of pancreatic cancer and identify where improvements could be made.
Key findings are encouraging with an overall increase in survival rates, however pancreatic cancer remains a disease with very poor outcomes with 61 per cent of patients presenting with metastatic disease within four months of diagnosis. A larger number of pancreatic cancer patients come from lower socio-economic backgrounds and families bear the burden of travelling for hospital stays and surgery. Positive aspects of the report suggest some clear recommendations, including a more consistent approach to multidisciplinary meetings. According to the data analysed, 75 per cent of patients died in hospital during active treatment, suggesting the need for earlier involvement from a palliative care team.
This reinforces the work we began last year with our first VCCC Pancreatic Cancer Registries, Trials and Translational Research Symposium convened by A/Prof Peter Gibbs, VCCC Research & Education Lead in Gastro-intestinal Cancers. Certainly this newly published cumulative data will support our efforts in improving survival in patients with pancreatic cancer through adding value to the work of our world-leading pancreatic cancer researchers such as Prof Sean Grimmond, Bertalli Chair in Cancer Medicine, Director University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research. Our second pancreatic cancer symposium will be held in October this year – details will be released soon.
Online learning is a key tool for the VCCC, enabling us to provide high quality, highly accessible cancer education to the cancer workforce in Victoria and beyond. We were therefore delighted to launch the Cancer Survivorship for Primary Care Practitioners program in July. This groundbreaking program was developed with consumers, affiliated partners and many committed and hardworking people from across the VCCC alliance. Close to 500 participants have registered for the inaugural Massive Online Learning Course (MOOC), endorsing an educational paradigm with the ability to translate best practice learnings for both a local and global community in a dynamic and constantly evolving way.
Professor Grant McArthur
Executive Director
(Image: Frank McGuire MP, Dr Kylie Mason and Prof Jon Emery from the University of Melbourne with the VCCC education team and consumers at the launch of the Cancer Survivorship for Primary Care Practitioners course)
