'Beyond Bricks and Mortar - Building Quality Clinical Cancer Services' Symposium 2011
Symposium 2011 - Day 1, Wednesday 10 August 2011
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Introduction, Open and Welcome
Dr Norman Swan:Good morning everybody. Hello hello. Nice to see some familiar faces from last year. Welcome to those who - or to all of you and particularly those who have come back but welcome to the people who weren't here last year for our very successful symposium in Canberra. My name is Norman Swan and I'll be chairing, MC'ing, facilitating the next two days of your life, for better or for worse, and let me know if it's for worse. And really it is truly building beyond bricks and mortar. Last year we spent a lot of time talking about what a good cancer service looks like, you know, even excepting the fact that a lot of the new regional cancer centres, which is what we were discussing, were focussed on radiation oncology.
This year the lens is very much on radiation oncology full force in terms of what it takes to build a good service. What does quality mean to the extent to which things should be mandatory versus voluntary? How do you get ownership of safety and quality so that it pervades each one of your services. These are not easy questions to answer. Using the cliché, if we knew the answers we'd have done it already.
In your background papers there's lots of examples where people have deployed standards and followed them through with varying degrees of success. And I think where we want to be tomorrow, without usurping Brian's presentation in a moment, is a much stronger sense of what would be the way of implementing, following up and making these standards meaningful at a practice level and at a patient level. Because I think if they're not, we will struggle. And I'll be trying to shape the discussion in that way.
Each one of the presenters knows they're talking for 15 minutes or so, a little bit more than that, and with some time for questions and we've built in some fresh air around the presentation so plenty of time for you to pick their brains and talk and raise issues as we go along.
Brian Richards is launching this conference and welcoming you. He is chair of the Radiation Oncology Reform Implementation Commission ... Committee I should say. He is Executive Manager of the Health Technology & Medical Services Group in the Department of Health and Aging and was the first CEO of the ACT Division of General Practice, has been heavily involving in the health IT agenda for many years in Australia and in his current role and others, provides high policy advice to government including on cancer-related matters. Please welcome Brian Richards.
Dr Brian Richards:
That's the price you pay for knowing Norman Swan too long. I never put any of that in the little bio we gave him but you can't escape your past apparently.
I’d like to welcome you all here today and thank you very much for attending and participating in what I hope will be a very inspiring and helpful couple of days. The Radiation Oncology Reform Implementation Committee as most of you would know is an AHMAC subcommittee – it sits under the Clinical Technical and Ethical Principle Committee of AHMAC and RORIC has a number of working groups which do a huge amount of work in a number of important areas in relation to service planning and workforce, and the focus of today’s session and tomorrow’s session is on quality. And so I’d particularly like to thank members of the Quality Working Group for organising and inspiring this workshop.
This workshop follows on from a similar workshop we held last year that was really targeted at those who had recently found out that they had received funding for development of regional cancer centres and were sitting there like stunned mullets, I think, a lot of them wondering what to do next. And we had such strong and positive feedback about how practical and relevant last year’s symposium was that by popular acclaim we’ve been asked to put on another one this year, this time focusing on the quality story.
So I’m really pleased that we’ve got over 170 delegates to this symposium from all over Australia including from regional and remote parts of Australia. I’d also like in opening the conference to acknowledge the Kulin nation and to pay respect to the elders past and present and acknowledge the land on which we’re having this meeting.
Similar to last year’s symposium we’ve invited a number of speakers from outside the cancer space, and in particular I welcome Associate Professor Anthony Weeks and Dr Kate Willis-Sullivan who’ll be talking later today about their three year rollercoaster ride in trying to establish a new maternity service here in Melbourne, and I think there’ll be lessons that will be relevant for people establishing any sort of new health service.
I’d also particularly like to welcome and acknowledge a couple of people who have come here on a sponsored program because of their new entrance to the radiation oncology area and who were nominated to attend this conference as part of their professional development – welcome Cassandra Duggan from Tasmania, Rebecca Cohen from Western Australia, Julia Hoyne from Norther Territory, Alan Turner from Victoria, Merryn Finnlay from New South Wales, and Wesley Tom from the ACT, and I hope you all make them welcome and hope they will find this symposium informative and rewarding.
I’d also like to again thank Norman Swan for coming back on a repeat performance. Norman is an excellent facilitator and as I was reminded in the way he dragged things from way back in my long distant past, I’ve known Norman a very long time, and I’m very pleased to have Norman working with us again.
I’d also particularly like to thank Abel MacDonald, the director of the Radiation Oncology section in the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing and his team, who’ve done a lot of the leg work supporting the Quality Working Group and in organising this forum and I think they’ve done a fantastic job and I think over the next two days you will see the benefit of their hard work.
So the focus of today and tomorrow is bringing together public and private sector providers of radiation and medical oncology to talk about and to share experiences in building quality initiatives into the work that they do in delivering cancer treatments. Although there’s been a lot of talk and a lot of announcements and a lot of focus on the bricks and mortar of the regional cancer centres initiative and the buildings that are being built for $560 million of Commonwealth investment, along with investment from other sectors as well, I think it’s important to look beyond the bricks and mortar which is the theme of this conference, to really talk about the people side, how we build programs, how we improve the experience and the treatment outcomes for the patients, to explore and look at strategies to address the challenges that come with a rapid expansion of infrastructure and hopefully develop some new ideas and share some solutions and build the contacts with each other that you can continue to follow into the future.
A number of very important announcements are being made, and initiatives being described in this symposium: the first of which is the trial and finalisation of the radiation oncology practice standards, and I’m very pleased that Chris Milross, who’s the Dean of the Faculty of Radiation Oncology in the College of Radiologists, will be speaking about the practice standards later this morning. And I’m also excited that we’ve got the opportunity to hear from Ivan Williams from ARPANSA about the establishment of the Australian Clinical Dosimetry Service, which went live in February this year, and with which many of you will have close interaction over the coming couple of years.
I hope you will all be able to come to tonight’s conference dinner. We’ve been able to persuade Michael Milton, an inspirational world-class athlete who has a personal experience of the cancer system, both as a child and as an adult, as our dinner speaker.
While talking about radiation oncology practice standards, another important event in this symposium is the launch tomorrow of the release of an options paper, discussion paper trying to seek feedback on a range of options for what we do next now that the standards have been developed and trialled. What do we do with the standards, and an options paper I’d encourage you all to read when it’s released tomorrow and encourage you even more strongly to respond, hopefully having read it. So the options paper has been prepared by RORIC's Quality Working Group specifically as a vehicle to gather feedback about what the sector thinks is the preferred approach. None of the options in the paper is the current policy position of either the Australian Government or any of the states and territory governments; the work being done by the Quality Working Group of working up options, consulting with the sector on the range of options that might be available and then consolidating that advice, moving on to looking at the resources and costing implications is all part of bringing advice up through to AHMAC and health ministers. So it’s a without prejudice document that it simply canvasses a range of possible options and seeks your feedback.
So partly as a result of the Regional Cancer Centre Initiative but also as a result of a lot of other public and private investment, it’s forecast that there’ll be about a 25 per cent growth in the capacity of radiation oncology facilities in particular, but also cancer facilities generally, and this is occurring – this rapid expansion of service capability is occurring in the context of an ageing workforce, workforce shortages in a number of areas, rapidly changing technology, which is challenging us all in acquiring new skills, a growing incidence of cancer in keeping with the ageing of our population, and in the context of tightening financial resources – all of which increase the potential for things not to go optimally, and underline the importance of events like today’s and tomorrow’s meeting and the symposium, to give us all an opportunity to actually step back and consider where the risk are, what the control points might be and what we should do to mitigate those risks and move forward successfully.
So in opening the symposium I do hope that you enjoy the program that the Quality Working Group has put together. The Quality Working Group is also very keen to hear your feedback at the end of the two days, and I would encourage you to complete the evaluation form that you’ve been handed out in your information packages, and as you’ll see from the camera at the back we’ve decided to film this year’s event so it can be made available to those in the sector who are unable to attend this seminar, and with the agreement of the speakers, we will be posting the presentations on the Department’s website. Dr Swan is fortunate also to have been given the job of preparing a report of the proceedings as he did last year, and that will also be made available to participants and published for further dissemination.
So it’s with great pleasure that we open today’s and tomorrow’s conference and look forward to the presentations. Thank you.
(applause)
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