Newsletter: November 2017

Greetings

SAVE THE DATE: Patient Seminar 29 November, 5:30 – 7.30pm

I’m delighted to advise that Dr Henry Chan from North Shore Hospital has agreed to come and speak to us on his recent work looking at multiple myeloma incidence and survival outcomes in New Zealand.  Dr Chan has just delivered a paper on this at the Haematology Society of Australia and NZ’s annual scientific conference.

We have been very fortunate to secure a lovely venue courtesy of Russell McVeagh in Lambton Quay and we’ll take the opportunity to make this an end of year event with drinks after the seminar.  More details to follow, but please do save the date.

Website

The website has been improved and reformatted to make it easier to navigate. More fresh content has been added and we would welcome your ideas and contributions of items and articles that may be of interest.

Facebook

The private Facebook group now has 38 members on board and some interesting discussion on recent posts. Please encourage people to join, as we will be using it as the noticeboard on upcoming patient seminars and any events of relevance to the group.

Medical Myeloma Interest Group

Myeloma NZ hosted and helped sponsor the inaugural meeting of this group held at the Miramar Golf Course rooms on August 9. There was a good attendance of 18 doctors and nurses with an interest in myeloma. We had a wide range of presentations including talks on medical imaging and myeloma bone disease therapy. Two Pharmac representatives attended and we were able to ask questions and get them to elucidate their decision-making process around new therapies. The day was considered a great success and another meeting will take place next year.

Fundraising

We’ve been fortunate in receiving a generous donation from the Florence Peterson Leukaemia Trust which will help fund some of our projects in the coming year. The trustees are also pursuing other funding options.

 

Queenstown Summit Meeting

Planning is underway for this meeting which will be held in August 2018. We have already managed to secure two excellent overseas speakers.

Once again thanks to our trustees and other helpers without whom we would not be able to function.

Warm regards

Ken Romeril

CEO