At this meeting we actually have a session that is a collaborative session with other member organisations from around the world, including ONS, EONS, Africa, Asia and Australia/New Zealand. We’re talking about inter-professional care for patients and the new innovative roles that have been emerging in nursing care in cancer around the world.

And you’re also looking at the whole patient journey.

We are looking at the whole patient journey and we’re really just talking about innovative roles and they are from the beginning to the end across the entire continuum. Navigation is one of the key ones that seems to be a big buzz word and a lot of people have in their slides navigation roles. Then inter-professional collaboration across the journey to try and make sure that we’re actually accessing the right healthcare professionals at the right time for all patients rather than just focussing on nursing.

And palliative care?

Palliative care is included, there are some unique palliative care roles that are identified. There is a strong focus in Australia on palliative care and in the presentation she’s got quite a few unique roles in palliative care that are going to come out as well.

And you meet?

Actually the organisation meets every other year historically. This coming year we actually are starting to meet annually; our next meeting is in July of next year in Vancouver and we’ve just switched our annual meetings to every year instead of every other year. So it will be Vancouver in July and then a year later in Hong Kong.

And you’re wanting all the national…

All the national… well, we take all comers. Anybody that is in oncology nursing is… and actually we’re reaching out to other disciplines now as well - anybody that is interested in, actually, patient care within cancer. But we are looking… specifically the actual focus of the meeting in July is around research, nursing research in cancer, and we’re looking for nurse researchers to actually come and present. We’re trying to do one year where we focus on actual care and the next year we focus on research. We’ve just put out a call for abstracts and so it’s on our website.