Caregiver, Survivor and Advocate: Katie Couric

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The legendary broadcast journalist Katie Couric sat down with CURE® to discuss her advocacy work in increasing cancer awareness with Stand Up To Cancer.

After losing her husband and sister to cancer and surviving colorectal cancer, broadcast journalist Katie Couric became an advocate for collaborative efforts to improve research, awareness and treatment of the disease. The legendary broadcast journalist sat down with CURE® to discuss her advocacy work in increasing cancer awareness.

“I wanted to really reach out to patients emotionally and caregivers as well, because I know firsthand what they’re going through and it’s a very lonely experience,” said Couric.

Couric is the co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, an organization that has raised over $600 million that goes to scientific researchers working in collaboration on “dream teams” that are attempting to come up with better treatment options, said Couric.

Couric also joined Merck on the “With Love, Me” campaign, where patients with cancer can talk about what they wish they knew through writing letters to their newly-diagnosed selves. Couric said, “I thought this could be extraordinarily useful to people who are going through it right now.”

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For patients with cancer, the ongoing chemotherapy shortage may cause some anxiety as they wonder how they will receive their drugs. However, measuring drugs “down to the minutiae of the milligrams” helped patients receive the drugs they needed, said Alison Tray. Tray is an advanced oncology certified nurse practitioner and current vice president of ambulatory operations at Rutgers Cancer Institute in New Jersey.  If patients are concerned about getting their cancer drugs, Tray noted that having “an open conversation” between patients and providers is key.  “As a provider and a nurse myself, having that conversation, that reassurance and sharing the information is a two-way conversation,” she said. “So just knowing that we're taking care of you, we're going to make sure that you receive the care that you need is the key takeaway.” In June 2023, many patients were unable to receive certain chemotherapy drugs, such as carboplatin and cisplatin because of an ongoing shortage. By October 2023, experts saw an improvement, although the “ongoing crisis” remained.  READ MORE: Patients With Lung Cancer Face Unmet Needs During Drug Shortages “We’re really proud of the work that we could do and achieve that through a critical drug shortage,” Tray said. “None of our patients missed a dose of chemotherapy and we were able to provide that for them.” Tray sat down with CURE® during the 49th Annual Oncology Nursing Society Annual Congress to discuss the ongoing chemo shortage and how patients and care teams approached these challenges. Transcript: Particularly at Hartford HealthCare, when we established this infrastructure, our goal was to make sure that every patient would get the treatment that they need and require, utilizing the data that we have from ASCO guidelines to ensure that we're getting the optimal high-quality standard of care in a timely fashion that we didn't have to delay therapies. So, we were able to do that by going down to the minutiae of the milligrams on hand, particularly when we had a lot of critical drug shortages. So it was really creating that process to really ensure that every patient would get the treatment that they needed. For more news on cancer updates, research and education, don’t forget to subscribe to CURE®’s newsletters here.