MOGA Chair Update, April 2025

Dear Colleagues,

As your professional organisation MOGA is involved in many activities to support you so that you can provide the high quality, dedicated care to your patients that we know you all do every day.

I recently attended the Japanese Society of Medical Oncology meeting where I was invited to represent MOGA and had discussions with our colleagues in Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea about the workforce issues that are impacting all of us. We have also been working on what we can do about this locally and will shortly be putting out an EOI inviting you to join a working group with the aim of developing national benchmarks of Medical Oncologist workload as it pertains to the increasing complexity in cancer care, identifying workforce gaps and future challenges and highlighting and addressing the wellbeing of Medical Oncologists.

Professor Phil Parente and Associate Professor James Lynam represented MOGA at a recent meeting of the Council of Presidents of the Medical Colleges (CPMC) and Special Societies regarding the supply of specialists in Australia and potential solutions.

Access to drugs for our patients is an ongoing issue, including both shortages of old drugs as well as delayed access to new drugs. Our Oncology Drugs Working Group provides regular feedback to PBAC about proposed new listings and has met with the chair of the PBAC Professor Robyn Ward to discuss these issues.

In September the first in-person ACORD program post COVID was a great success, thank you to everyone involved in the organisation of the meeting as well as the faculty who donated their time. ACORD is a flagship program for MOGA that is a fabulous example of the leadership that the Australian oncology community brings to cancer research internationally.

More recently, we are aware of the current negotiations taking place in NSW with regards to the new industrial award for medical staff and will be supporting our members as well as providing a response to the health minister.

This is just a small fraction of the activities and advocacy provided by our executive committee members as well as many of you who we reach out to for advice, thank you all for your contributions.

I look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at our next Annual Scientific Meeting in Melbourne which has an amazing program looking to the future of immunotherapy.

Kind regards,

A/Prof Melissa Eastgate

Chair, Medical Oncology Group of Australia