Zacharoula Sidiropoulou, Senior Consultant Breast Surgical Oncologist at Hospital São Francisco Xavier, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Two panels. One core message: cancer systems don’t collapse from lack of technology; they collapse from lack of people and lack of governance.
Honoured to have spoken at the 3rd Synergies Forum on Cancer: Policy, Research & Funding Strategies, organised by the Hellenic Cancer Federation | ELLOK in Athens.
Day 1 — “Securing the Oncology Workforce as a Prerequisite for Health System Resilience”
Cancer strategy in Europe assumes someone will be there to deliver it. Yet we keep planning care as if the workforce were infinite and unbreakable. It is neither. Recruiting, retaining and protecting oncology professionals is not an HR issue, it is patient safety, it is equity, it is resilience. I said it as a breast surgical oncologist, as a Unit lead, and as someone working on surgical workforce equity around the globe: workforce is not a line item. It is the system.
Day 2 — “Connecting the dots: ECHoS | Establishing of Cancer Mission Hubs: Networks and Synergies, EU-CiP: The EU Cancer
Information Portal Project, CANDLE Project, EUnetCCC – European Network of Comprehensive Cancer Centres”
The EU Beating Cancer Plan and the Cancer Mission gave us the instruments; what connects them is governance. Three conditions:
- National cancer hubs with mandate, budget and life beyond the project cycle
- Common quality indicators, so that patient information is a governed standard, not a local accident
- Patients co-governing, not merely consulted.
An information our patient cannot understand is care we do not deliver. Health literacy must stop being a value we praise and become a criterion we enforce, written into how we accredit centres, design portals and fund programmes.
Grateful to Hellenic Cancer Federation | ELLOK and its President George Kapetanakis and Marina Ximeri for a forum that treats patients as partners, not audiences; to the brilhant moderators Prof. John Yfantopoulos and Maria Tzima; and to all my co-panelists for the honest, forward-looking discussion.
The best part of forums like this is never on the programme: remarkable people who arrived as colleagues and left as friends. Right Δημητρης Δεληγιαννιδης and Μαρια_ Κρητικου? Or even promising collaborators, correct: NIKOLAOS PISIMISIS and Paraskevi Mihalopoulou ?
And something else no programme can capture: the pleasure and honour of speaking about cancer care in Athens, the city where I grew up and that I carry in me. Wherever medicine has taken me from Italy, to Spain, to Portugal and Guinéa Bissau, Athens is where it all begins. Returning here as a speaker felt like closing a circle.
The boulder keeps rolling back. We keep pushing, in plain language, together.”
Other articles featuring Zacharoula Sidiropoulou on OncoDaily.