2nd ECHoS Inception Dialogue held in Oporto

Aiming to establish National Cancer Mission Hubs (NCMH)  in each Member State and Associated Country, ECHoS is developing in collaboration with the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies – a partnership hosted by the World Health Organization – a specific type of meetings called Inception Dialogues.

These meetings aim to help national stakeholders co-designing and co-creating the NCMH making it a meaningful structure to implement Cancer Mission objectives and advancing cancer research and cancer care in each country.

In the first day of October 2024, ECHoS and OBS organized the second Inception Dialogue in Portugal, in the beautiful city of Oporto. This session was part of a reflexion session entitled “Fighting cancer: a European Objective, a National Determination”.

The meeting started with two inspiring talks detailing the implementation of EU Mission Cancer and Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan (EBCP), by Kay Duggan-Walls (European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation) and Vittoria Carraro (European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety). These presentations were key to understand the strong interlink between both EC initiatives.

In the centre of the discussion was the central role played by citizens and other stakeholders in the implementation of Mission on Cancer and EBCP objectives. Also highlighted were the great number of initiatives that have started and are planned to start until 2027 in the cancer area. It is thus imperative to create synergies and collaboration opportunities to ensure coherence between both ambitious initiatives.

Ending the first part of the meeting, Anabela Isidro (ECHoS Coordinator and Member of Agency of Clinical Research  and Biomedical Innovation – AICIB‘s board) elucidated the work conducted by the ECHoS project to capacitate partners in the creation of National Cancer Mission Hubs in each MS/AC with the competence and tools needed to implementation of these two initiatives.

Following the presentation of the European Landscape, José Dinis (Director of National Programme for Oncological Diseases at the Directorate General for Health) and Hugo Soares (ECHoS Co-coordinator) presented the National situation in regarding the implementation of a national strategy to beat cancer and the work developed by the National Cancer Hub-PT.

In the second half of the meeting, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (OBS/World Health Organization) incited experts in the room to come-up with ideas and suggestions to help NCH-PT accelerating the implementation of Mission on Cancer in Portugal. The discussion, moderated by Dheepa Rajan, Florian Tille, and Yulia Litvinova, highlighted the need to continue investing in Patient engagement and simplifying administrative aspects of the Portuguese system. It also highlighted the important role played by the NCH-PT as a convener of the Portuguese cancer community since this is highly fragmented both geographically and in governance (scattered through different institutions).

Ending the meeting, Ebba Hallersjö Hult from the Stockholm School of Economics shared an insightful view of “Vision Zero Cancer” initiative, showcasing how a structured approach to cancer, organized according to a Mission-driven Research guidelines, can result in meaningful and application-ready solutions.

This was truly an inspiring example on how multiple stakeholders from the private and public sector can come together in the fight against cancer.