Champion's Prize Supports Greater Collaboration in New England through the Perini Clinic at Boston Children's
Throughout June - National Cancer Survivor Month - we've been sharing updates from our 2022 Survivorship Champion's Prize recipients. This month’s final update features the David B. Perini Jr. Quality of Life Clinic for Childhood Cancer Survivors at Dana-Farber Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, which received last year's Recognition Award for Collaboration.
The David B. Perini Jr. Quality of Life Clinic stresses that the Recognition Award funding has contributed to renewing and innovating initiatives to further their long-standing collaboration with local peer institutions, the Consortium for New England Childhood Cancer Survivors (CONNECCS), to assure that they continue to meet the needs of childhood cancer survivors in the post-COVID era.
Since the last update, the Perini Clinic hosted an in-person CONNECCS meeting which had been on hold since the start of the pandemic in 2020. The meeting was held at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston on April 26th and had their largest attendance for a CONNECCS in-person meeting to date, with twenty-six pediatric survivorship providers traveling from across New England to attend.
Consistent with the mission of the Children’s Cancer Cause, the aim of the meeting was to address how they can advance the equitable delivery of survivorship care across the region. The agenda included presentations on state-of-the-art survivorship care for children and adolescents treated for brain tumors and state-of-the-art options for fertility preservation for survivors. There was a special guest speaker on the impact of material hardship on disparities in cancer survivorship. Finally, there was a lively and productive roundtable discussion exploring how to bring virtual survivorship educational programs to diverse populations of AYA survivors who are followed at the CONNECCS member institutions.
Outcomes from this meeting were:
Enhanced provider knowledge about issues critical to cancer survivors;
Provider education about how material hardships results in disparities in outcomes for survivors; and
Identification of CONNECCS members interested in joining a working group to continue to explore the process of bringing virtual survivorship education to AYA in their region.
Most importantly, the meeting resulted in a renewed commitment from CONNECCS members to ongoing collaboration with the goal of improving care of childhood cancer survivors.
Dr. Lisa Kenney, a senior physician with the Clinic, noted that remaining Recognition Award funds will support the collaborative work of the newly formed CONNECCS Virtual Education Working Group.