The Foott Memorial Lecture meeting of the Society took place at the Ampfield Golf Club on 13th February 2019. The President, Dr Terry Wood, was in the chair. The minutes of the previous meeting were read and approved. A period of silence was held in memory of Dr G H Foott. The President invited Professor Colin Johnson to deliver the lecture which was entitled “Quantity and Quality: Life in a Cancer Centre”. Professor Johnson started by making some observations on some similarities between himself and Dr Foott. He said that this lecture was partly about quantity of treatment for pancreatic cancer at Southampton’s Regional Cancer Centre but very much about researching quality of life for patients with it. When he started to research the quality of life of pancreatic cancer sufferers some years ago there was nothing written about it and, he added, he was thought to be a bit cookie to be doing it. Now everyone is researching this aspect. The quality of life assessment is how the disease affects patient’s physical, emotional and cognitive functions; and how the effects of pain, gastro-intestinal symptoms, cachexia and malaise and the consequences of learning about a poor prognosis affect them. To do this one had to devise suitably robust questionnaires. At first he didn’t know what or how to ask the questions; for instance the impact of symptoms is different from their severity - it is about the patient’s perception. Now they have developed numerous questionnaires for different age groups, analysis of symptoms, comparison of long term survivors with normal people and he discussed their various results. The team have now progressed into computer adaptive questioning. Professor Johnson then discussed quantity of care. The first recorded operation for pancreatic cancer took place in 1896 in Bologna and the patient unfortunately died. The most successful operation for pancreatic cancer was developed by Alan Oldfather Whipple in 1935 in Columbia. A difficult and extensive operation that demonstrates the principle that the more operations you do the better the survival rates. The results have improved steadily since records began in the 1940s. During the 1990s it became evident that specialist surgeons doing 15 - 20 procedures a year had very much better outcomes when compared with surgeons performing Whipple operations less frequently, so much so that the NHS set up Specialist Treatment Centres in the early 2000s. Southampton is one of them. Initially there was only one surgeon but now there are four and the overall mortality here is 3% against the UK standard of 5%.
The President thanked Professor Johnson for his very interesting lecture. The meeting was closed at 9.50 pm