Our Annual Congress took place from September 14-16 at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and, as many of our participants experienced, this wasn’t your typical congress! When have you ever been to an event where you start the day dancing to uplifting South African music with an impromptu rap performance by one of the delegates, a senior radiation therapist from Tanzania?

Elsewhere on our agenda, we had high-quality contributions on every level necessary to get cancer under control and improve the quality of life of the global cancer patient:

• Prevention – key to decreasing cases yet governments fail to work with us on this
• Screening – we are still using ineffective and inefficient methods
• Diagnostics – there is so much more to diagnose than the classic pathology
• Treatments – safe, effective and affordable treatments for all, not only for the rich
• Aftercare – we need to support patients living with chronic cancer

In summary – we can do better

We were honoured to award Professor Khama Rogo from Kenya with the Inspire2Live Patient Advocate Hero of Cancer award for his tremendous work with patients across Sub-Saharan Africa. In many parts of the world, patients would gladly exchange their problems with those experienced by patients and healthcare providers in the more economically developed countries. Khama pointed out that there are still so many empty chairs to fill to ensure that patients are adequately represented, and he challenged us to work on this.

We know what to do but there are so many cases when we just don’t do it. We do not implement what we already know. Only by working together with the entire medical industrial complex can we achieve what is necessary i.e., a decrease in the global number of cancer patients and an increase of their quality of life.

Peter Kapitein
Patient Advocate Inspire2Live