Society of Gynecologic Oncology President Outlines Initiatives for Her Tenure

Pharmacy Times spoke with Seiko Diane Yamada, MD, the 53rd president of the Society of Gynecolgic Oncology (SGO), as part of the 2022 SGO Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer. Yamada discussed her goals as president of SGO as well as key initiatives that she has been championing.

Seiko Diane Yamada, MD: So, I started my tenure as president of SGO in March of 2021 and some of the areas of focus and key initiatives that I've been championing have really centered around our strategic plan [and] our mission. So, the mission of our society is to prevent and treat gynecologic cancers with equity, improving our patients lives through advocacy, engagement, education, research and collaboration. And our strategic plan is centered around promoting standards of excellence, fostering greater diversity, inclusion, and accountability within our societies so that we can better care for our patients and improve the health of our patients and support our membership, which is multidisciplinary and global.

So, the theme for this year has been building bridges and breaking down barriers. And certainly, we know, in the health care field in general and in gynecologic oncology, that there are many obstacles to optimal health care for our patients. So, education, for instance, and ability to access education has been limited. So, we've placed a great emphasis on opening up our educational activities and our meetings to make them as accessible as possible. And this year, our annual meeting in 2022 will be the first fully hybrid meeting that we will do along with live streaming, and that will give people maximum amount of access to the tremendous educational insight into the content that we have to offer. COVID has certainly limited the ability of our trainees to participate in surgical sessions and surgical webinars. And so, we've placed a focus on doing that this year, opening that up so that our trainees and early career faculty have access to the best surgeons and gynecologic oncologists and surgical specialists that are out there.

And then we spent a tremendous amount of time fostering diversity within our society and within our leadership so that we have a broad breadth of expertise and perspectives that can address some of the obstacles and the barriers that are leading to less-than-optimal outcomes for the cancers that we're taking care of. And then, one of my big initiatives has been looking inwardly at our membership, to foster engagement and professional development. And so, we initiated the development of this leadership institute this year, in partnership with our foundation for women's cancer, which is really meant to open up the pipeline of leaders in our society and provide professional development opportunities and career skills that we think will serve them very, very well in whatever aspects of gynecologic oncology they're going to be pursuing.