When the summit steering committee got together to decide what the subject should be and there were various proposals, I was quite keen on the one about the economics of cancer control. I did an economics degree, trained as an econometrician then went to banking and having come into this industry I felt that we were missing a trick. A lot of our arguments about placing cancer on the global health agenda are based on mortality figures and the moral cause but, as my friend Sir George Alleyne always says, you have to make an argument with your head, your heart and your pocket but we weren’t making the argument through the pocket or, if we were, we were making it in different ways depending on who you spoke to and what part of the cancer control spectrum you were talking about. So I was delighted when the steering group said, “Yes, let’s proceed with this, this is a good thing to have.” But we went into it with the knowledge that we would probably… an outcome from the summit would be a recognition that we don’t have the language and we don’t know enough and we’ve got to do more. I think we got there without embarrassing anyone whatsoever. I was particularly pleased, I had one of the delegates came to me yesterday and said, “I loved the summit, I had an ‘A-ha’ moment.” This is a very senior person in the cancer community and I said, “What do you mean by that?” She said, “I recognise now where we’ve been failing in talking to our government. We have not been able to articulate the case, framing it appropriately with a strong economic bias and I’m going to work on that when I get back to my country.”

The World Cancer Congress is really… so that we set some principles when we design this and one of them is to make sure it’s interactive, that we get people around the world that want to bring the best and take away the best and we try to be innovative. So if I was to take a couple of things, not just the one thing that I’ve been so proud of, it’s the ideas which started off in a room 18 months ago which were then tested with members around the world saying, “Does this resonate with you?” and them coming back with a positive and then seeing that converted from a white board into reality. So I’ve just come out of the big screen where we’re using the main plenary to show off the most extraordinary short films which have had such a major impact in countries around the world. The people who are showing those films off are saying, “We want others to use these, the same concept, the same ideas,” and they’re opening up. Now when we did this two years ago in the World Cancer Congress we didn’t have things like that. I think that’s what gives me the buzz, to see the idea which we talk to members about go from a white board into reality and then to see the feedback from the delegates saying that was fantastic.

Now, two years to Paris. What are you going to be doing for the next two years?

We’ll be doing a lot in terms of UICC. If you’re talking about the World Cancer Congress what we will do before 2016 we’ll reflect on this particular congress, we will think what went well, what could be improved and what else we want to do in Paris. I think we’ll come up with an agenda and a theme which will resonate once again with the delegates who are here. I think they trust us now through the process that we go through that it really is built around their requirements. So that’s a piece of work that needs to be done and then we’re going to design, probably in the next year, and then get it running.

But in terms of UICC and its members, for me the agenda is still pretty clear. We’ve got to get cancer on the global health agenda and the development agenda. We want to run a great World Cancer Day next February 4th on the theme Not Beyond Us. We want a great leaders summit in Istanbul in November next year and the theme on that will be how to work collaboratively, effective international collaboration, which is a great theme for us because we do that in so many ways. But we can really highlight best practice in that space. Of course we’ll then start the cycle of getting ready for Paris the year after that. So it won’t be a quiet time in between congresses, it will be busy still.