As cancer remains among the most dominant causes of death in the region, the Cancer Centre Eastern Caribbean (TCCEC) is continuously working towards more effective and efficient diagnostic techniques.
“Cancer patients are treated and cured not by single individuals but by a team” explained Dr. Tom McGowan, Managing and Medical Director of (TCCEC), at the opening ceremony for The Eastern Caribbean Cancer Pathology Meeting. “When you think about how you treat cancer and how you cure patients with cancer, the single most important thing you can do is make the right decision on how to treat them. You can have someone carry out the treatment perfectly, but if it’s the wrong treatment you are carrying it perfectly wrong. So you need to make the right decision and modern cancer therapy it means that we must have multi-disciplinary decision making. All of the people that are involved in the cure of cancer need to come together to decide how they are going to treat the patients and we only decide that based on diagnosis. So pathology is the foundation of cancer treatment.”
It is against this background, recognizing that diagnostic oncology is the foundation for oncology patient management, that The Cancer Centre hosted a two-day meeting which commenced on March 3, at the Coco Resort in Rodney Bay.
The official meeting comprised of a team of pathologists, clinical personnel, and others involved in quality of care from across the region.
Pathologist Dr. Stephen King said the thrust behind this is to create a network which will benefit the Caribbean.
“Creating a community of practice under the Eastern Caribbean diagnostic oncology network, what that does is it allows us to implement standards, to work together for peer review, for second opinions, it allows us to no longer practice in a solo way where we have a small population of people served by a single practitioner pathologist but rather the entire OECS population served by a group of pathologists who are supporting each other in this network. In addition, one would appreciate that we need communication technology and information technology so that we can actually share images and information so that we can deliver the kinds of quality diagnosis that we know our conditions require of us.”
The Cancer Centre Eastern Caribbean (TCCEC) is working closely with government and other health institutions to effectively network, in order to curb this dominant malady and help save lives.
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