In June, InterSurgeon had the pleasure of speaking with Mr Kristian Aquilina, a Consultant Paediatric Neurosurgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), London, UK. Mr Aquilina, together with a team of paediatric neurosurgeons in the ISPN Paediatric Neuro-Oncology Task Force, fis conducting a survey on how neurosurgeons throughout the world treat children with brain tumours. We found out more about the formation of the task force and how they are going to use the survey to support paediatric neuro-oncology practitioners globally.
Inception
1 year ago, Mr Aquilina had a call with past president of the ISPN, Dr Shlomi Constantini, who was concerned about the state of global paediatric oncology care; “One of his concerns while he was president was that many people throughout the world were doing brain tumour surgeries without much support from anyone else. Children with brain tumours need much more than surgery – in high income countries such as the UK these children are cared for within a large multidisciplinary team. Unfortunately this is not always the case in many places throughout the world..”
Mr Aquilina and his co-chair Dr Adriana Fonseca, a neuro-oncologist at the National Children’s Hospital in Washington DC, formed a worldwide committee together with colleagues from the USA to South Korea to Cairo g. The backgrounds of the committee are equally impressive and include Professor Ulrich Thomale, the current editor of the Child Nervous System Journal and scientific chair of the ISPN, Professor Mohammed El Beltagy, a paediatric neurosurgeon working in Cairo who runs one of the largest paediatric brain tumour programmes in the world. Each member has a special interest in neuro-oncology and have been meeting for the last 9 months to discuss what they can do to support the global surgical community in their specialty.
Supporting global surgery
The committee came to the conclusion that in order to best serve paediatric neuro-oncology practitioners, they needed to find out what the community needed. “The first thing we wanted to do was to set up a survey. And it’s taken us a while. We’ve got a RedCap survey with about 20 questions that takes about 20 minutes to complete. And the objective of the survey is to try and see what people are doing and how they are supported in their neuro-oncology work throughout the world.” The survey will enable them to identifiable actionable areas of support; “[We want to] see how we can help them [the paediatric neuro-oncology community] in any way. See if there’s anything we can do as ISPN, the International Society for Paediatric Neurosurgery, to help them… we can perhaps offer to meet on a regular basis, discuss difficult cases and share our journeys with them and see if we can be of any help that way…there isn’t anything like that at the moment that’s so global. And we thought we could be in a position to work through that”
Sending the survey with InterSurgeon
They have initially distributed the survey using the ISPN network and now are looking further afield for more respondents; “We thought maybe if we collaborate with InterSurgeon, we may be able to disseminate more, encourage more engagement, and eventually form a group that is committed to working to try and make this better in the longer term. Making it better really means perhaps increasing experience, trying to share what we perceive as best practice in the West, Europe and the United States, trying to develop databases and collaborating with medical oncologists who will support these children after surgery. I think we have an opportunity here to have a global reach with ISPN and InterSurgeon’s help.”
Survey link
If you work in paediatric neuro-oncology, please complete this survey and help the ISPN Paediatric Neuro-Oncology Task Force complete their mission to support and improve services globally.
