MASCC Participates in Japanese Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (JASCC) Virtual 2020 Annual Meeting
2020 MASCC proudly participated in the Japanese Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (JASCC) 5th Annual Meeting held in August. Originally planned for Kyoto, the meeting was held virtually due to COVID-19. The meeting included a novel hybrid of both pre-recorded and live sessions. The theme of the meeting was “Diversity, Dialogue and Altruism,” and included the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Japan Psycho-Oncology Society (JPOS) and the 25th Congress of the Japanese Society for Palliative Medicine (JSPM).
The joint MASCC/JASCC session was “The current situation and prospects on the education of supportive care in cancer.” It was chaired by Dr. Mitsue Saito, and Dr. Matti Aapro, who introduced concepts of what supportive care entails and gave a European perspective. The session speakers were Drs. Jong-Huen Kim of Korea, Kunihiko Ishitani of Japan and Ian Olver of Australia. Ian Olver highlighted MASCC educational resources from web-based guidelines, tools to a textbook and MASCC’s journal, Supportive Care in Cancer.
Dr. Olver also presented “Future Perspective on Supportive and Palliative Care” in a session chaired by Dr. Toshiaki Saeki of Japan. He expanded upon the recent MASCC article “Supportive Care - A MASCC Perspective,” recently published in Supportive Care in Cancer. He discussed field changes with new immunotherapies producing new supportive care challenges. He also emphasized that supportive care must extend to survivorship care. “Technological advances in teleoncology, remote patient monitoring, and virtual reality devices will extend the capability of supportive care in future,” said DR. Olver. “COVID-19 has forced changes in how we interact but also teaches us that we can still have highly effective conferences that are webcast, mixing both live and pre-recorded elements. I suspect that post-COVID conferences will mix face to face with digital presentations to reach a wide audience.”
