The End of Treatment Cliff; Why Cancer Survivorship Deserves More Attention

Talks on Tuesdays: Real lectures in your favourite venues. 45-min& Q+A with Dr Chandrika Gibson Perth Launch Event Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner. This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about. Event Schedule: 6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open 7pm Lecture Starts 7.45pm Q&A 8pm Talk Concludes 8.30pm Event Closes. *Please arrive close to 6.30pm A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go. Your Topic: The End of Treatment Cliff; Why cancer survivorship deserves as much attention as the search for curative treatments. Finishing treatment is cast as a time for celebration. But for many people it is also the moment they feel abandoned by the healthcare system. Diagnosis and treatment is better than ever, which means more people living with and beyond cancer. The consequences are physical, mental, and social, and they persist for years, sometimes decades. We know a great deal about what helps. Exercise medicine, psychological and social support, rehabilitation, healthy lifestyle interventions, coordinated follow up and individualised survivorship care. Australian cancer policy increasingly acknowledges this. Yet there remains a striking gap between policy aspirations and survivorship as a funded health service. Drawing on my research, including my COSA Survivorship Fellowship, I am proposing a talk with heart and science, that imagines what cancer care would look like if we stopped treating the end of active treatment as the finish line Your Speaker: Dr Chandrika Gibson is a psychosocial cancer researcher, yoga therapist and writer, who has spent her career asking what really helps people live well through and, beyond cancer. She is Research and Project Lead at Breast Cancer Care WA. There, she develops the Living Well after Breast Cancer and Living Well with Metastatic, Breast Cancer programs, shaping them together with the people they serve., Chandrika's research listens closely to lived experience. Her studies have explored, how people with head and neck cancer cope with a changed appearance and a lost, voice, how they return to the things they value, and what burnout looks like for the, professionals who care for them. Her recent work maps the winding real-world, journeys of women with breast cancer., She is also a certified yoga therapist and founder of Surya Health. She brings, together rigorous science, embodied practice and a deep curiosity about how people, find their way back to themselves.