Spring Group Meeting: Less Schmoozing, Same Great Content

I don’t think the meeting lost anything essential in the compression from four days to three – except for a significant fraction of the cost. 

I heard uniformly positive comments on the new schedule from members I spoke to, who told me that although the tighter timeline meant they had to really be on their toes, they were able to attend the sessions they wanted and needed to get to.

The word from session chairs was that they were able to complete their committee work in the shorter sessions +/- supplementation with earlier phone conferences, although the work had to be – and was – completed more efficiently.

The primary downside I heard about was that there was less time for in-the-hall schmoozing between sessions.

All in all, I think we have good evidence that we can continue to have two briefer face-to-face group meetings each year.

Among the changes to the schedule, we consolidated our former Plenary I and Plenary II into a unified session with a translational medicine segment and a segment on community engagement. This combined plenary featured four extraordinary presentations and was extremely well received.

My traditional group chair’s update to open this session covered some unusual ground, including addressing recent federal directives that have had an impact on SWOG. As the work of our group is primarily federally funded, we’ve taken necessary steps to comply with some of the White House’s early directives, particularly those related to diversity and gender, including updating the language on our website and in our grant applications. 

I want to emphasize, though, that we remain committed to our mission to improve the lives of all affected by cancer.

Science and data are at the center of meaningful research, and we have a scientific mandate to ensure our clinical trials enroll groups that are broadly representative of our nation’s demographics, to ensure the results of those trials can be generalized. 

In fact, representative enrollment remains a requirement for us under federal law. The latest revision (March 15th) of the U.S. Public Health Service Act (PHSA: SEC. 492B. [289a–2]) still says that, in supporting clinical research such as SWOG’s, the NIH director must ensure that 

     (A) women are included as subjects in each project of such research; and
     (B) members of minority groups are included as subjects in such research.

The PHSA also stipulates that the NIH director should 

     ... conduct or support outreach programs for the recruitment of women and
     members of minority groups as subjects in projects of clinical research.

The Act further states that NIH institute directors should ensure that their institute’s activities “are focused on reducing health disparities.”

Representative enrollment and reducing health disparities remain priorities for SWOG.

My plenary update also addressed budget challenges and potential further cuts to our funding, topics that were recurring themes in San Francisco.

Over the previous grant year, our NCTN budget had been reduced by 5 percent under the Congressional continuing resolution. For the current grant year, which started March 1st, our budget has taken an even deeper cut – 10 percent.

That shortfall is substantial, although we have not made changes to current trials and have not cut staff. We have, however, in addition to reducing group meeting costs, eliminated positions and trimmed the level of salary support for those in SWOG leadership roles. I’m gratified that responses to these cuts from SWOG leaders have been 100 percent positive, with many telling me we need to put that money toward our patients.

Further cost-cutting measures have involved consolidating infrastructure. One step we’ve just taken as part of that consolidation is the sunsetting of our digital engagement committee. This was a difficult decision, one made jointly with Drs. Lara and Hershman as group co-chairs-elect.

Our digital engagement committee has done important work, including publishing key papers on the roles of social media in advancing oncology care and research, and I am sorry to close it. At this moment, however, making the organization leaner just makes sense. Hopefully, much of the work can continue at the individual committee level.

I’ve devoted most of this post to updating you on my plenary update, but I do want to highlight some sessions from San Francisco. I’ll limit myself to two of the most memorable.

The first was a plenary talk by Dr. Banu Symington on increasing the representation of rural patients in our clinical trials. More than 20 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, but matching that percentage in our trials has proven elusive. Dr. Symington’s talk set lots of people thinking not only about barriers to enrolling rural patients but also about challenges rural healthcare sites face to even offering NCI trials to those patients in the first place.

As I’ve stated above, our mission is to improve the lives of all those affected by cancer, which includes this significant fraction of the country’s population, and Dr. Symington’s talk was a topic of conversation in later sessions in San Francisco, including our board of governor and committee chair meetings the following day. 

We had already been considering how we might make it easier for sites in rural areas to participate in trials – for example, by adjusting our rules about accrual minimums to better align with the realities faced by rural clinical sites. Dr. Symington’s words really moved us and will point us in some new directions. I call that a successful plenary talk (members can catch the plenary recording via swog.org).

Another truly memorable session I attended was Dr. Ian Thompson’s Meyskens Lecture on Advances in Cancer Prevention, in which he discussed lessons learned from two landmark SWOG prevention trials in prostate cancer. His talk was an absolute tour de force. Dr. Thompson has always been incredibly valuable to SWOG, and this lecture was moving, informative, and fun. A recording (it’s within the prevention, screening, and surveillance committee session) is now posted to swog.org for logged-in members. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

In fact, recordings of almost all of the hybrid sessions will soon be accessible to members on swog.org. And if you registered for the meeting, you should have just received an invitation to complete our group meeting survey. What was your San Francisco experience? Please have your say!