Dialogues

Oct 29, 2024, 10:54

ASCO24 Updates: Dr. Verduzco-Aguirre on Advancing Geriatric Oncology Care

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting is one of the largest and most prestigious conferences in the field of oncology. This year, the meeting took place from May 31 to June 4 in Chicago, Illinois. The event gathers oncologists, researchers, and healthcare professionals from around the world to discuss the latest advancements in cancer research, treatment, and patient care. Keynote sessions, research presentations, and panel discussions are typically part of the agenda, providing attendees with valuable insights into emerging trends and innovations in oncology.

This year, OncoDaily was at ASCO 2024 for the first time covering the meeting on-site. We had the pleasure of interviewing researchers who summarized the highlights of their work.

In this video, Dr. Verduzco-Aguirre, A medical oncologist from Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Medicas y Nutricion Salvador Zubiran, Mexico City, shared insights on ‘Development and implementation of a geriatric oncology interprofessional case-based educational intervention for cancer care providers.‘

Hello, my name is Verduzco Aguirre. I am a medical oncologist, and I currently work as an attending physician at Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Medicas y Nutricion Salvador Zubiran in Mexico City. Today, I want to discuss our work on the development and implementation of an educational intervention regarding geriatric oncology aimed at both oncologists and geriatricians.

This work was funded by Concord Cancer Grant, an international innovation grant in 2023. And we aimed to address one of the main barriers that we have previously found in order to expand the use of geriatric assessment in Mexico, which was a lack of knowledge both in oncologists and in geriatricians, both regarding on how to perform and how to interpret a geriatric assessment in a context of treating older adults with cancer. So we developed an intervention using content from ASCO and the International Society of Geriatric Oncology Guidelines on geriatric assessment.

And we, based on Project ECHO’s methodology of a case-based learning, we developed a 12-week online intervention aimed at both oncologists and geriatricians who practiced at the same site in order to foster implementation, later implementation of geriatric assessment. Our intervention was able to provide an increase in knowledge, competence, and performance of geriatric assessment both in oncologists and geriatricians.

And we hope that further interventions can be useful implementation tools in order to increase the reach of evidence-based interventions such as geriatric assessment in older adults with cancer.

We hope that this type of intervention can help expand the reach of geriatric assessment and geriatric oncology principles throughout the world, and especially in resource-limited settings such as low- and middle-income countries.

More videos and content from ASCO 2024 on OncoDaily.