Santiago Millan, Technical Lead, Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines at World Health Organization (WHO), shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I’ve travelled to over 40 countries in my UN career, but none was quite like Mongolia. Did you know? With more than 250 sunny days per year, Mongolia is referred to as the ‘Land of the Eternal Blue Sky’.
Last week I had the chance of visiting the country for the first time, being part of what felt like a summit of childhood cancer.
Key highlights from these days in Ulaanbaatar:
Meeting with Ministry of Health officials led by State Secretary Dr N. Erdenebayar and key national stakeholders, together with colleagues from WHO Mongolia and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital to discuss progress (the country joined the Global Platform for Access to Childhood Cancer Medicines in 2023) and initiate discussions on sustainability.
Leading a global webinar to announce our scale up plans for the Global Platform, live from WHO Mongolia, where Tsetsegsaikhan Batmunkh, Director of Public Health Policy Implementation at MoH, presented Mongolia’s journey with the Global Platform and encouraged other countries to join.
Joining a panel at International Society of Paediatric Oncology – SIOP Asia Congress 2026 to discuss international collaboration in paediatric oncology, with the great Catherine Lam, Toby Kasper, Gevorg Tamamyan and Godfrey Chi-fung Chan.
Hosting a Global Platform side event with St. Jude colleagues. The heart of the event was a discussion on transforming access in practice, where we heard from Moldova (Rodica Mindruta-Stratan), Mongolia (Shalala Ahmadova), Sri Lanka (Sanjeeva Gunasekera) and Uzbekistan (Khilola Rustamova). It was also a great demonstration of WHO’s three levels at its best, with WHO’s WR in Mongolia Socorro Escalante and EURO’s Vitaly Smelov!
Attending the opening of Childhood Cancer International Asia Conference 2026, meeting its great community and reflecting on the importance of incorporating the voices and perspectives of people with lived experience including childhood cancer survivors and parents in everything we do.
Networking, catching up and learning from colleagues… sometimes by hearing great presentations… others by simply sharing a chat over coffee, a walk or dinner.
P.S. What I enjoyed about Ulaanbaatar when not working?
A run in the city that I managed to squeeze one of the days. While not always possible to visit countries as much as I would love to, carving out 1 or 2 hours for a combination of health and tourism is always worth it!
Shopping for local art crafts (found some great water colour paintings to inspire my kids!) and cashmere clothes (following clear instructions from my wife, couldn’t return home with empty hands!).
The people I met in Mongolia are so welcoming and warm, constantly reminded me of the abundance of sunshine and the vastness of the land where they live. This was my first visit to the country but definitely not the last… looking forward to returning soon!”
Other articles featuring Santiago Millan on OncoDaily.
