APOS President Highlights Focus on Expanding Access, Education

Jesse Fann, MD, MPH, spoke about his American Psychosocial Oncology Society (APOS) presidency and what it means for the Society and community. He focused on what APOS is as an organization and what he hopes to accomplish during his 2-year role.

He spoke about access and education as being 2 pillars they need to focus on, as well as advocating for the multidisciplinary space to have more of a foothold within the oncology community. Looking forward, Fann hopes to better position APOS as the leading educator of psycho-oncology in the field.

Fann is Mark N. Tabbutt Endowed Professor for Education in Brain Health at University of Washington (UW) Medicine, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and adjunct professor of rehabilitation medicine and epidemiology at the UW School of Medicine, and medical director of psychiatry and psychology at Fred Hutch Cancer Center.

Transcript:

There’s a lot of work yet to be done. The focus of APOS is to help [patients] with cancer who have needs related to their psychological adaptation to the cancer—their emotional state, social issues, and spiritual needs. APOS is focused on helping [patients] get their needs met. APOS is unique in that it’s multidisciplinary. My focus will be to help APOS advance the field of psychosocial oncology by ensuring that [patients] who need psychosocial help get the help that they need. Unfortunately, many [patients] still aren’t getting the help that they need for a number of reasons. There’s still a lot of stigma around mental health. It's getting better, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in that area.

A lot of [patients] who are getting treated for cancer don’t have access to the psychosocial care that they need. There just simply aren’t enough providers around to help. APOS is growing. It’s nearly 1000 members now, which is wonderful, but if you think about all the [patients] who have psychosocial needs, it’s a drop in the bucket. We need to find better ways to make sure that people have access to psychosocial care, and that means that we need to continue to do research. APOS needs to help advocate and promote research in this area, ranging from health services research all the way to more basic research, to look at ways that we can help [patients] with their needs. Then we need to be involved with educating mental health providers who are interested in helping this population but didn’t get the training to understand all the needs that the [patients] have.

APOS is positioned to be at the forefront of education in this field. That’s going to be a primary focus of my presidency. As a researcher, I’m going to do everything that I can to help promote and help develop our early career [by] training trainees who are coming up to get interested in this field [and] to get the education that they need and the opportunities to [conduct] research in this area. It’s just so important. I’m very excited about the prospects coming up. As you can see from this meeting, it keeps growing, and it's a wonderful organization to be part of.