Creating Space for Community
How we continue providing emotional support for people facing cancer throughout COVID-19
Our Guest Bloggers collaborating on this summit overview are members of The Max Foundation team based in India who led and participated in the Friends of Max 2015 Leadership Summit. They include Shilpi Sirohi Singh, Ashika Naik, Ameya Surve, and Priyanka Kandalgaokar.
Last month, Friends of Max (FOM), the support group arm of The Max Foundation (Max) in India gathered for their second Leadership Summit in Hyderabad. Friends of Max is a charitable trust registered in India comprised of individuals impacted directly and indirectly by chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GIST). More than 120 City Chapter leaders and the whole team from The Max Foundation in India attended the meeting on 18th and 19th April 2015. This event rallied advocates and practitioners who serve and support people living with cancer in India. It was a full couple of days!
The highlight of the first day was the medical session focusing on issues related to long-term therapy in CML and GIST, chaired by Dr. Pankaj Malhotra. Physicians from the FOM Medical Advisory Board shared their valuable inputs on this important topic. The physicians from our network in Hyderabad joined by the senior physicians and Max CEO, Pat Garcia-Gonzalez, discussed establishing a consensus or guidelines for managing CML and GIST in the subcontinent.
Efforts and courage are not useful without purpose and direction, and we know this through the tireless work of the Friends of Max City Chapters. In the afternoon, six City Chapters showcased activities and achievements which won them recognition as Best Practices at the Leadership Summit:
The Leadership Summit was off to a great start with all the best practice sharing so that leaders could learn from each other. And we still had another day ahead of us!
The Max Foundation is a leading global health nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating health equity. For 28 years, Max has pioneered practical, scalable, high-quality solutions to bring life-extending treatments and patient-centered health care to more than 100,000 people living with cancer and critical illness in low- and middle-income countries. Max believes in a world where all people can access high-impact medicines, where geography is not destiny, and where everyone can strive for health with dignity and with hope.
Nestled in the mountains of Peru, there’s a place called Cusco where you’ll find the cancer patient group, Lazos Solidarios (Solidarity Ties). Yusef Herrera, created Lazos Solodarios to help cancer patients in this remote region in 2009 and today, the organization is supporting families facing CML and LLA, many of them children. Yusef, a dentist, became a committed advocate to close the cancer divide between these rural communities and their access to treatment and support.
A new study in Clinical Epidemiology and Global Health features the Glivec®Patient Assistance Program (GIPAP) and reveals that “chronic myelocytic leukemia (CML) is diagnosed at an earlier age in poorer populations than in more affluent populations.” The study focused on India’s CML population to investigate other possible contributors to early age at onset. The team of authors….