First day at OMG! Summit

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CURE booth st OMG! Summit

I'm excited to be here in Las Vegas to cover the OMG! Summit for CURE. Not only is this my first time to cover a conference for the magazine, but it also cuts to the heart of why I got into journalism: meeting people and learning their stories.Today, I got to meet young people still in treatment, people years out from treatment, old friends of CURE, lots of new faces and people I've only communicated with via email, like Emily who just wrote a guest blog for us. And everyone's excited to meet everyone else. I got the pleasure of getting to talk to Christina. It's her first time attending the conference as well. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer just after her 39th birthday and has been in treatment since. She said when she went to her local Gilda's Club and tried to meet people with a similar diagnosis, she found they were at a different stage at life. They wanted to see their grandchildren graduate while she just wanted to see her daughter through first grade. But she found people to connect with in I'm Too Young For This! Cancer Foundation and said that she feels like it's a "we" now. And that's what's really great about this weekend--the feeling of camaraderie. I can't wait to meet more people and hear more stories. Is there anything you want to know from the attendees?

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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.
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, an expert on CLL
Yuliya P.L Linhares, MD, and Josie Montegaard, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, experts on CLL
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