
NCCS Announces 2019 Stovall Award Honorees, Dr. Harmar Brereton and Dana Dornsife
(NCCS) is pleased to announce that the 2019 winners of the Ellen L. Stovall Award for Innovation in Patient-Centered Cancer Care are Harmar Brereton, MD, founder of the Northeast Regional Cancer Institute, and Dana Dornsife, founder and board chair of the Lazarex Cancer Foundation. Now in its fourth year, the ...

Introducing PatientTrueTalk.com – A Way for Advocates to Directly Help the Newly Diagnosed
Patient True Talk is the only patient-to-patient registry where patients and/or their caregivers can create profiles with as much information as they feel comfortable sharing, and find matching profiles based on algorithms created by some of the country’s top clinical oncologists. Patients/caregivers can also search along their diagnosis/treatment parameters, refining ...

Health Care Roundup: ACA Open Enrollment News; Head and Neck Survivor Mental Health Study; Fear of Recurrence Webinar; More
Open Enrollment for ACA Now Underway — Open enrollment for 2019 ACA plans began yesterday and will run through December 15, 2018. Despite numerous attempts to repeal the ACA in 2017 and an ongoing court case in Texas, the ACA continues ahead, business as usual, for the most part. Many ...

NCCS Webinar Video: “Understanding Fear of Cancer Recurrence”
Those with a cancer experience are all too familiar with the anxiety that many experience wondering and waiting if and how cancer may return. New research is helping shed more light on what exactly “fear of cancer recurrence” means as a measurable patient outcome, psychological and emotional factors that may ...

NCCS Awarded American Institutes for Research Grant to Develop New Outcome Measure: “Return to Functional Status”
UPDATE FEBRUARY 2020: Read a summary of this research project at www.canceradvocacy.org/RFS. The National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS) was awarded a grant from the American Institutes for Research (AIR), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, to develop a new quality measure concept for “return to functional status.” ...

A Medical School Perspective: Beyond the Science, We Must Learn to Communicate with Patients
By Nainika Nanda, MD — Survivorship. What does this mean? Oncology highlights patients currently battling cancer. However, survivorship encompasses a longer timeline. Cancer requires lifelong care, which is achieved through proper doctor-patient communication. In fact, this relationship is a keystone of medicine. Unfortunately, it can lose focus in the sea ...

The Dempsey Center – An Oasis for Anyone Facing Cancer in Maine
On behalf of the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), I had the wonderful opportunity to visit Lewiston, Maine, in October for the annual Dempsey Challenge. Hundreds of cyclists rode between 10 and 100 miles to raise funds for the Dempsey Center. After attending the cancer survivors’ walk with hundreds ...

Mommy, Where’s Your Hair? (And Other Questions I Faced as a Parent with Cancer)
It’s one thing to have cancer, and quite another to have children witness it. At age 37, I was diagnosed with Stage IV inflammatory breast cancer; I had a large tumor in my left breast, and the cancer had spread to lymph nodes and a rib. And I had a ...

Guest Post: For the Love of a Friend
My dear friend Avery[1], a woman I’ve known since we were 10 years old (in 5th grade together) was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) in 2006. Having observed my mother’s battle with breast cancer in the 1980s, I considered myself a veteran of the struggle. Times change. Diseases evolve ...

Guest Post: For the Love of My Mother
In 1983, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. I was in college at the time and flew home to be by her side when she awoke from a radical mastectomy. My mother was fearless in the face of a disease that few spoke about outside of very private spaces ...