Workshop at Uppsala Health Summit 2018: Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments

The international Uppsala Health Summit is an annual meeting for dialogue on challenges for health and healthcare. The summit is a collaborative effort between eleven Swedish public and not-for-profit partners, led by Uppsala University. Each year, the summit focuses on one challenge for health and healthcare and the question on how to overcome obstacles from implementing knowledge from research and innovations. Around 200 personally invited experts from all over the world and from different sectors come together to engage in dialogues in plenum sessions and in solution-oriented workshops. Last year, delegates came from 39 different countries.

Summit 2018: Care for Cancer

This year’s summit takes place form 14-15 June 2018 is themed Care for Cancer. Patients today have more opportunities than ever to survive and even to recover from cancer. However, the world is facing growing incidence and prevalence of cancer and preventive actions (e.g., adopting a healthy life-style) can only solve some parts of the problem. The provision of financial resources as well as equal access to treatments is challenging for healthcare systems around the world, despite growing treatment opportunities.

Uppsala Health Summit 2018 focuses on how we can open up these opportunities for a growing number of patients, by making better use of data and technologies and on how such use can pave way for a more equitable access to the best possible treatment and diagnostics within any given context.

The programme is available here and addresses a broad range of topics in workshops and plenum sessions. Some of these are: precision medicine in cancer care, patients as a driving force to develop care, long term care for cancer survivors, access to treatments and diagnosis, implementing physical exercise in cancer care, and many more.

Our Workshop: Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments

HTO group members Åsa Cajander, Christiane Grünloh, and Jonas Moll are also organising a workshop on Using Data for Better Cancer Treatments. In our workshop, we will make use of the Critical Incidents workshop format we have used before at other venues (e.g., at NordiCHI 2016, which is described in more detail in this paper, and at Medical Informatics Europe 2018, which Jonas wrote about on his blog).

A critical incident is an event that has happened to a person and that this person regards as important or significant in some way. Such an incident can be very useful to learn from, and thus it can be an event that is perceived as positive or as negative. Critical incidents have been used a lot for critical reflection in areas such as aviation (e.g., to analyse failures or human errors), health, education and social work.

For our workshop we reached out to experts and asked for incidents we could use in our workshop to inspire discussion in the group work. Kelechi Eguzo, Marije Wolvers, and Isabella Scandurra will present their critical incidents, which have been illustrated by Maja Larsson.

As the aim of our workshop is to develop Visions of the Future, we are very happy that Prof. Bengt Sandblad will give a keynote on Future Workshops, which is a well established method that has been used in various domains (e.g., healthcare, traffic control, administrative work). Making use of the instructions for a future workshop, we will then develop visions of the future from different perspectives: researcher, physician, nurse, or patient.

Together with more than 60 delegates who signed up for our workshop, we will sketch A Day In a Life in 2050. As workshops at the Uppsala Health Summit are solution-oriented, we are including answers to questions such as:

Who must be involved?
Who can take the first step?
How will this contribute to more efficient cancer care?
How will this contribute to more equal cancer care?
Improve to the individual patient’s quality of life
How can this influence which health decisions the patient and her kin can make?

We are really looking forward to the Health Summit and will also attend other workshops and plenary sessions. You can read the pre-conference report where all workshops are outlined here.