Anne Letsch

“The opening symposium of the Berliner Symposium Integrated Palliative Cancer Care was a success. We thank 200 participants, who showed great interest and engagement for the topic and had an important impact to make this event lively and successful. Continuous progress in the treatment of cancer patients, prolonged survival times with cancer, demographic changes and the new Palliative Care and Hospice Law need a change in thinking and better integration of supportive and palliative care concepts in cancer care. For this topic being of medical societal and political relevance we wanted to establish an event series in Berlin for Berlin. Our intention is to create a forum to enhance a multiprofessional, interdisciplinary discussion how to integrate Palliative Care early and meaningful in comprehensive cancer care. The main topics and questions would be; FOR WHOM?, WHEN?, WHAT?, WHERE?, and FROM WHOM?, interface problems, options of cooperation and networking and related barriers. For the future we want to design a platform, where through interaction and discussion of new concepts and cross-linking of multi professional and multi institutional care teams we will be able to enhance individualized Palliative Cancer Care in Berlin. This will also be the basis for further research projects, which are related to Integration of Palliative Care in Oncology and network research.”