I’m the Executive Director for MASCC which is the Multinational Association for Supportive Care in Cancer. Supportive care is the management of side effects of cancer and cancer therapy and we work with the 17 different side effect topics where we have study groups making evidence based guidelines for how to treat side effects. We have a paediatric study group and we have a geriatric so it should cover the spectrum.

And you meet how often?

We meet yearly. It’s in our charter, in our bylaws, that we should have an annual meeting and it should alternate between continents. Usually it’s been between North America and Europe but in 2016 actually we are going to Oceania, we will be in Adelaide in June 2015.

How do you get your guidelines out and who reads them? Does anybody read them?

We get a lot of traffic to our website. We are a very altruistic, proud and poor society because we basically give everything free of charge out to everybody. So all our guidelines and patient tools are free to download from our website and increasingly we are making guidelines together with major other societies like ASCO, like ESMO, like EONS and like ONS etc.

How do you know the guidelines have any impact?

The studies being made on supportive care following the guidelines show that there is a significant decrease in side effect levels. Usually when you work with anti-cancer therapy it’s bad if you have to prolong the treatment free intervals, if you have to make dose interruptions etc. but by using optimal supportive care you can make the anti-cancer treatment much more effective, keeping the original dosage schemes and the original time schedules and so on. So from that perspective supportive care is important. It’s also important from the fact that with the demographic, people getting older, a lot of people getting cancer, they call it the cancer tsunami actually, the thing is in many countries they cannot afford very expensive anti-cancer therapy and maybe it’s not even relevant for this group of patients. So optimal supportive care is a fantastic and non-expensive way to go.