Elizabeth Mittendorf, Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, shared on LinkedIn:
“I was honored to join American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) colleagues at Sarawak General Hospital to help kick off a Multidisciplinary Cancer Management Course focused on hepatocellular carcinoma – and to participate in the ceremonial balloon popping to officially open the program.
This course was particularly meaningful because it marked the culmination of ASCO’s six-year partnership with Sarawak General Hospital through our International Cancer Corps (ICC) program. SGH became ASCO’s first ICC site in 2020, and what has been accomplished since then is a wonderful example of what sustained global collaboration can achieve.
Over six years, the partnership has included multidisciplinary cancer management courses focused on breast cancer, cervical cancer, H&N cancer and now HCC; palliative care education; Project ECHO and other educational initiatives – and, importantly, those efforts have translated into changes in care.
SGH established dedicated palliative care and hospice units, developed palliative care nurse champions throughout the hospital, and helped extend trained palliative care nurses to district hospitals across Sarawak. Multidisciplinary neuro-oncology collaboration has also changed how patients are approached, with neurosurgeons now routinely engaging oncology colleagues before surgery.
I was especially pleased to be there with ASCO Chief Medical Officer Julie Gralow and deeply grateful to ASCO volunteers Ted Hong and Jiping Wang for sharing their expertise and giving their time to make this HCC course possible.
As this formal chapter of the ICC partnership comes to a close, I left Sarawak reminded that the most meaningful global partnerships are not simply about bringing knowledge from one place to another. They are about learning together, building lasting relationships, strengthening local capacity, and creating teams that can continue the work long after a particular program ends.
Thank you to our colleagues at Sarawak General Hospital for six years of partnership – and for the extraordinary work you continue to do for patients across Sarawak.
Raising 1 finger in the picture is what their team does to acknowledge that they are one team working together to move cancer care forward in Sarawak.”
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