Friday 16 January 2015

Training Opportunities in Paediatric Oncology

Wish you all a very Happy New Year. As always, at the beginning of each year, I make several resolutions, one of which includes posting on the blog more regularly. This year, over the next few posts, I would like to share with you some national and international collaborative efforts to try and improve the lives of our children with cancer.

Education and training are fundamental to delivering good care to our children with cancer. This need not (and should not) only be a single opportunity but an ongoing effort of continuously updating ourselves. For various reasons, including lack of appropriate opportunities and resources, health professionals in low and middle income countries have been limited in accessing education and training. Internet has gone a long way in addressing this limited access - an excellent example being the volumes and volumes of educational material available for free on the website www.cure4kids.org.

Now the SIOP PODC Education and Training Working Group have initiated a bold and exciting idea of developing a repository of training in paediatric oncology clinical medicine or research intended for health care workers from resource-limited countries https://sites.google.com/site/sioptrainingopportunities/home. Each training opportunity is classified by country as well as by the category of opportunity e.g. nurse training, nutrition training, paediatric oncology fellowship, cancer research, etc. My congratulations to Jeremy and Jaime and Neil for the stellar effort.

Finally, and very importantly, such an initiative can only succeed if we spread the word about such a resource and also submit any such training opportunity we know of, however big or small by clicking on this link