IN 2021 GUONE WIDENED ITS OFFER OF DIGITAL EVENTS
GUONE – Uro Oncological Group of the North East is a Scientific Society with a long-standing tradition.
Established in the 90s, Guone carries on periodic refresher and continuing education courses for young medical specialists, along with two top annual events and a series of educational activities in the ward and in the operating theater.
What is uro-oncology?
It is an interdisciplinary medical subspecialty, featuring multi-disciplinary teams formed by medical oncologists, urologists, radiotherapists, anatomical pathologists and nuclear physicians.
Uro-oncology addresses diagnosis, research and treatment of the cancers affecting the male and female urinary tract (kidney, ureter, bladder and urethra) and the male reproductive organs (prostate, testicles and penis). It embraces a full-range of specific aspects dealing with urologic health, with a special focus on prostatic hypertrophy. Therefore, it is difficult to give a fully comprehensive account of such a complex multi-disciplinary approach to cancer (the above list is partial and does not provide an exhaustive description of it).
Urologic oncology has come a long way over the past few years. Robot-assisted surgery enables patients to recover faster. This, combined with the continuous evolution of pharmacological treatments and radiation therapies, has led to long-term improvements in coping with the disease, as far as the pathologies related to GUONE scientific activity are concerned.
Moreover, GUONE can perfectly exemplify the extent to which things have changed for the scientific community over the last one and a half years. A quick look at the Society event venues can be very revealing: as many professionals were not able to physically participate in the events because of the pandemic, GUONE had to find a solution to engage with remote participants (whether members of the Society or not).
The executive board’s resilience, summed up in the motto “If the professional is not able to come to GUONE, GUONE will go to the professional”, proved successful.
At first GUONE responded to the COVID-19 outbreak with a very basic online educational offer. By the end of 2020 though, what was initially a series of poorly structured events was transformed into a well-defined and coherent strategy offering high-quality online educational sessions and virtual meetings.
The virtual “mode” implementation started with the identification of the target audience and of the topics through which GUONE could engage the audience in the webinars. In addition to this, special attention had been paid to the choice of the best day and time to run the webinars. Eventually, this preliminary analysis focused on goal-oriented methodologies.
As a result, in 2021 GUONE launched three main projects. 53 educational events were held during the year, with 300 professionals of different medical specialties relevant to GUONE areas of interest who participated in them.
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3 formats for the meetings
COFFEE TIME WITH GUONE – GUONEED – GUONE YEAR 2021
THE EVENTS
COFFEE TIME WITH GUONE: a real-web based on the presentations of very challenging clinical cases to be dealt with a multi-disciplinary approach. The underlying idea is that uro-oncology experts need to share their everyday experience on a periodic basis.
Professionals of different medical specialties presented online their clinical cases for about 30 minutes. Discussion with the colleagues participating in the event commenting images and data through a multidisciplinary approach followed.
27 meetings from March to December.
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GUONEED: the educational project was originated by the need to entice the specialties of the regional realities involved into a tighter partnership, in order to manage the whole diagnostic and treatment process as a team, where member share their different expertise.
​ 6 meetings from April to December structured with a journalistic format.
GUONE YEAR 2021: 4 meetings (at each change of seasons) to discuss the most recent updates in uro-oncology: prostate, urothelial carcinoma, kidney cancer, penile and testicular cancer. An easy to use and efficient online format featured young professionals taking turns in offering their colleagues 4 new engaging and innovative events, which successfully met the needs of a specific target.
4 meetings on the: 21st March, 21st June, 21st September and 21st December.
The support of the industry partners turned out to be, once again, a crucial element.
In fact, after the success of the 2020 edition, industry partners still strongly believe in the potential of virtual events as a force bringing together the participants and the scientific communities they belong to.
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VIRTUAL: HOW DOES IT WORK?
The three virtual events were hosted on the ZOOM WEBINAR platform, with GUONE relying on the support of ISA, the virtual assistant guiding and helping you create and organize successful online events.
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