Zacharoula Sidiropoulou, Senior Consultant Breast Surgical Oncologist at Hospital São Francisco Xavier, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“In cancer care, being good is not enough. Our patients deserve excellent.
Last Saturday was the last session of the 1st PG Programme in Breast Disease, Advanced Education – NOVA Medical School.
24 sessions, 150 hours of workload.
And it felt like the programme knew how to end itself.
We spent the morning with something we rarely train for formally, yet use every single day. Communication. The hard conversations. The ones with frightened patients and families. The ones between surgeons and oncologists who see the same case differently. The ones a family doctor has to carry alone, often without a script. Briliantly delivered by Luís Ramos, Nuno Bonito and Helena Magalhães.
Guida Da Ponte guided us through it with the kind of honesty that makes a room go quiet, the one that a psychiatrist knows how to nail!
By the afternoon, the focus turned inward.
Physician wellbeing. Burnout. The cost of caring, when the system forgets to care back. It was a brilliant talk by Prof Dr. Sunil Kumar FCAI FRSA FBSLM FAcadMEd Dip IBLM, and I think it landed differently for each of us, depending on where we are in our journey. Some recognised themselves. Some recognised a colleague. Some, perhaps, recognised a version of themselves they don’t want to become.
And then, to close, our students presenting their projects.
The quality, the rigour, the way they had clearly absorbed not just the science but the spirit of this programme. That is perhaps the quietest proof that something here worked.
2 distinct proposals on Breast Unit organization, 1 for a Risk Assessment Specialized Unit and one on a Clinical Trial model.
And of cource, in each point a discussion was generated! A point for us to review, another POV to reflect over!
24 sessions. One focus. Countless conversations that will follow us into our clinics, our teams, our decisions.
This programme is not over. It is just beginning to show up in the places that matter.”
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