I’ve been the organiser of this year’s meeting, along with Omer Devaja and Nikos Burbos in the organising committee; scientific committee come from all round the UK. It’s the first time we’ve done this, actually, it’s based in London but combining with hospitals in smaller cities where it’s more difficult to host conferences so they can be involved in it. Of course, being in London, most of the work has ended up being with me but most of the major decisions have been joint decisions. So I hope it’s been a successful conference and people have told me they’ve really enjoyed it so that’s a reflection of everyone’s work – all three of us.

My highlights have been the surgical bits, actually. I really enjoy all the chemotherapy bits and it’s really important we all come here as a multidisciplinary team, but in the end the bits that really get me ticking are the surgical ones. We’ve had some fantastic surgical presentations – Professor Cibula, Professor Dubois have been particular highlights, they’re really senior, world-famous surgeons who have come along and delivered excellent speeches and Professor Dubois is always quite humorous as well, which is really nice too.

Then there are some other things, because I’ve chosen that subject and particularly asked for the speakers to come who have come and they’ve delivered great talks. We just had a talk about aspirin in prevention which was great. We had another talk in the New Opportunities for Therapies about HIPEC that I’m quite passionate about. Then we had a section on tumours that are difficult to treat and we had thoughts about operating from Professor Levine from the States and his talk also was excellent. But actually the quality of all the talks have been brilliant, even all the way through to the proffered papers where young people come and give us a ten minute talk about their research which is really tricky and they were all fantastic. The winner of the prize who will be announced shortly was consummately professional, delivering a talk that was well above her years and you’d expect nothing as good as that. So it was really impressive.

Could you elaborate further on the surgical talks?

Professor Cibula talked about resecting the pelvic sidewall which has previously been thought that if you had recurrence on the pelvic sidewall that person couldn’t be treated. Over the years I’ve done so pretty big resections on the pelvic sidewall and it’s difficult because sometimes it works and it’s amazing – you’ve saved someone and nothing else could have done it – but sometimes it can go pretty badly wrong or rather it just doesn’t work and the patient has disabilities afterwards, so nerve damage and, for instance, weakness in the leg. Then when you come along and see a presentation like we had from Professor Cibula who went through his work, very similar, and, one, shows you some added things you can add to what you want to do, but also is a little confirmation that what you’ve been doing is the right way because you need the support of colleagues to be doing the same things. So that, for me, was a big highlight.

Could you tell us about next year’s meeting?

This meeting… perhaps every year, actually, they get a little bit more multidisciplinary. So we had fifty nurses here, I don’t know how many medical oncologists there are, it’s tens not hundreds, we’ve had about a hundred unit leads. We’ve had a lot of gynae-oncologists and junior docs and it’s the whole teams. The team that works together in a hospital, they can come to a conference like this and learn together, learn about each other’s things. For instance the chemotherapy doctors I don’t think know that much about surgery and having surgeons from abroad talk about it, actually the physical doing it as opposed to the results of studies, I think that’s great because we learnt a lot about all these PARP inhibitors and it’s really nice to have that passing across of knowledge. Then, of course, we go out to dinner so it’s all team building and team working.