TIPPS Working Group

So one thing that is slowly becoming clear to me, interacting with practitioners from both LMIC and HIC in SIOP Global Health, is that the greatest need for PHO champions in LMIC is time-efficient support for their needs, ie old-fashioned mentoring to help curate the flood of online PHO information. The primary way this process will differ from "twinning" institutions is it will partner individuals. Accordingly, as soon as I get word about my co-Chair, we will begin the task of creating a list of partnering individuals (and confirming existing partnerships), and should have that completed by the end of Q3. 

So there is a definite enthusiasm to contribute, in whatever way. We had one member willing to step up as co-Chair, Nihad and I approve and have forwarded the expression of interest to Saghir and Michael. Given how much else is going on in other areas of SIOP Global and WHO-GICC we will stay with quarterly meetings for now and schedule our next one towards the end of July.

So out of 22 members who had the time (or made the time) to respond, this is who we are. I'm not sure how much I can read into this given the sample size, but a lot of physicians with prolonged commitment to our mission.

The title is deliberately provocative, first of all I should point out that Kate Matthay and Scott Howard have created a wonderful resource in the Global Neuroblastoma Network. As the Chair of the Neuroblastoma Committee of InPOG I can and should learn a lot from attending the meetings, but what I lack is time. In 2020 my Hospital in Varanasi India registered 475 new children with cancer. Even excluding patients who abandoned treatment (13%) or died from disease/infection (13%), this still left over 300 children from last year alone receiving active treatment. I am extremely fortunate to have an experienced team of two residents from Tata, along with two more hired locally, and a team of well trained nurses backed by the resources of Tata Memorial, but when I am exhausted at the end of the day I just don't want to attend another webinar! So while working with POINTE and providing resources is a valid goal of this group, maybe our primary goal should be ensuring that local champions

POINTE website  is the Paediatric Oncology International Network for Training and Education (I had to guess what it stood for!) that works closely with SIOP Global Health and stores a multitude of resources that could help practitioners in LMIC.