July 2004 Volume 13, Issue 3 SIG Hopes That More Activity at Congress Will Stimulate Member Attendance Judie Much, CRNP, AOCN®, APRN, BC Coordinator, Cancer Genetics SIG The Cancer Genetics SIG’s annual meeting at Congress found our group struggling with how to continue to attract and maintain members and new leaders. Not unlike some other subspecialty groups in ONS, we find ourselves losing our experienced leaders. Why? Because the more general nature of the Congress meetings does not lend itself to nurturing the advanced focus of this group through presentation of advanced and translational genetic information. The result: We lose attendance to other, more-specialized groups such as the International Society of Nurses in Genetics (ISONG), National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC), and even the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). When one examines these groups, however, one finds that the “cancer” part of the genetics (in the case of ISONG and NSGC) is just a subspecialty in the larger topic of genetics. ASCO finds itself in a way similar to ONS in that genetics is one of many subspecialties. Unfortunately, none of us can attend multiple conferences; indeed, most can attend only one major conference yearly, even if we have memberships in all of the associations. Always trying to make lemonade out of lemons, the Cancer Genetics SIG leadership has made this an opportunity to create a liaison with NSGC and fortify existing relationships with ISONG and ASCO. We have suggested joint educational programs, which can be presented at multiple meetings with presenters representing multiple groups. In this way, we hope that we can continue to appeal to both our “leaders from the past,” as well as create an atmosphere for development of leadership for the future. Another highlight of this year’s Cancer Genetics SIG activities was not only the invigorating networking meeting, but also the first (of what we hope to be annual) dinner educational session for our membership and the Chemotherapy SIG members, who were invited guests. Last year at our networking meeting, we heard about the evening educational meeting sponsored by the Nurse Practitioner SIG and decided to offer a similar type of offering. One of our members, Mary Clair Alexander, RN, BSN, OCN®, who works in industry, offered to obtain a speaker from her company’s speaker bureau. With that promise, Agnes Masny, RN, MPH, MSN, our coordinator at the time, worked with ONS and the Congress Team to obtain permission for the offering as well as a room. ONS Membership/Leadership Administrative Assistant Carol DeMarco publicized the offering via communiqué to the membership of the two groups. Along with the main speaker, Steven Shak, MD, chief medical officer at Genomic Health Inc., Agnes also secured another speaker from our own membership, Mary Ropka, PhD. Shak spoke with us about the translation of new technology to clinical areas: use of genomic profiling of individual tumors to be used in predicting the chance of tumor recurrence. Ropka presented a framework to support decision making for patients dealing with hereditary risk of cancer. The evening was very successful and was part of our effort to continue to attempt to provide advanced genetic information to our membership. Back to July SIGnal home page The SIGnal is a quarterly e-newsletter published by the Oncology Nursing Society for special interest group leaders.