I was fortunate to once again attend the British Thoracic Oncology Group (BTOG) Annual Conference with it being held in Edinburgh this year.  As a Lung and Thymic Cancer Clinical Nurse Specialist it is always a valuable opportunity to engage with the wider thoracic oncology community and gain insight into current advances in lung and rare thoracic cancers. It’s an important conference for multidisciplinary professionals to share research, education, and best practice.

I was also able to represent ThymicUK at the Advocates Meeting (photo below) which gave patient / support group representatives time to engage within BTOG and put forward their views whilst learning of emerging strategies and developments. This year’s Advocates Meeting involved updates on BTOG lung cancer screening and non-smoking lung cancer delivered by clinicians as well as discussion on the role of pathology in lung cancer and quality of life considerations were briefly covered with minimal time to spare.

I was also excited (and somewhat nervous) to be invited to present a Thymic Malignancies Update session within the BTOG/LCNUK (Lung Cancer Nurse UK Forum) Nurses Joint Session alongside a colleague Chloe Holmes who is a Thoracic CNS at Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

This was an amazing opportunity to inform and share clinical guidance and best practice of thymic cancers to the wider Lung nurse faculty and make them aware of ThymicUK/ITMIG and plans moving forward. It was very well received, and we had positive feedback after our talk by those in attendance.

At the end of the session, we invited any lung nurses with a specialist interest in thymic malignancies who are routinely seeing patients in their trusts to contact us directly with a view to them taking on the role of a thymic link nurse. This is a developing role, but we hope this collaboration and bringing together of nurses will be of important benefit to the thymic cancer patients as we know the value of this input for patients and their experience. We have already had contact from some nurses and looking to meet again in coming months.

The BTOG Thymic Malignancies Specialist Interest Group also held a meeting at the conference. Within the meeting the West Midlands team presented the development of their toolkit for a regional thymic MDT. The group are looking at how regional thymic MDTs can be established for the benefit of patients and clinicians.

It was the current chair David Gilligan’s (clinical oncology consultant at Papworth) last meeting as he is stepping down as chair of the group. David has been a key figure head in highlighting thymic malignancy clinical care for many years and has been instrumental in raising the profile of this rare cancer, developing the BTOG SIG group and supporting ThymicUK. We are very grateful for all he has done and time invested. He has handed over the role of chair to Maggie Harris clinical oncologist consultant at the Christie.

There was a lot of positives to take forward from the conference especially from the nursing session and some exciting opportunities for the coming year.