IPEP-Heath Student Network Cancer Care Conference 2022

Congratulations to the IPEP-Health Student Network for a very successful student-led annual conference.  Students and staff from mutiple disciplines came together to learn with, from and about each other while exploring the important health area of cancer care.

Interprofessional Education and Practice Health Students’ Network (IPEP-HSN) is a student society at the University of Melbourne with the aim to promote interprofessional collaboration across all healthcare students.

On July 31st 2022, IPEP-HSN hosted the event Cancer Care Conference: Acute to the Community. This event was led by President Vivienne Chan and Conference Coordinator David Teo, who are final year dental and physiotherapy students respectively. We were honoured to have highly esteemed clinicians in each field to join our speaker panel. The panel was composed of speakers Dr Surein Arulananda (medicine), Professor Michael McCullough (dentistry), Dr Polly Dufton (nursing), Dr Lara Edbrooke (physiotherapy) and Associate Professor Ralph Hampson (social work) each representing different healthcare fields. These presentations covered various topics of cancer care including breakthrough research on pharmacological interventions and multidisciplinary considerations of cancer management during treatment and rehabilitation.

The presentations were followed by interactive case discussions in which students collaborated in multidisciplinary teams guided by panel members, to discuss the management of different patients in a clinical setting. This provided students with a unique opportunity to gain insight into the perspective of other healthcare disciplines.

This conference exposed students from many different healthcare fields to the multidisciplinary care inherently required for cancer patients. We look forward to continuing advocating for interprofessional education at future events with the goal to improve our delivery of patient-centred care.

David Teo, Professor Michael McCullough, Dr Surein Arulananda, Dr Polly Dufton, Amy Bowman, Jess Crowe, Associate Professor Ralph Hampson, Vivienne Chan (left to right)

Professor Michael McCullough