The Division of Surgical Oncology in the Departments of Oncology and Surgery University of Calgary is one of the oldest in the country and was created 25 years ago.

It represents a relatively new subspecialty in the spectrum of cancer care. The need for this specialty is a result of the rapid advances of information in medicine, which in the next five years is predicted to be equal to all that has been created in the history of mankind and has been occurring in Oncology at a faster pace than any other area in medicine.

This has required surgeons to dedicate their training and practice to understand how to incorporate these changes into the surgical management of cancer. This requires a close relationship with all oncology subspecialties including medical oncology, radiation oncology, palliative care to name a few.

This division has been growing to meet this demand having over 20 members in all surgical subspecialties including: general surgery, head and neck, gastrointestinal, orthopedics, plastics and cutaneous with close links to ophthalmology, gynecology, urology and neurosurgery.

Within many of these groups there is a further development of expertise in special areas such as melanoma, sarcoma, breast, colorectal, liver and pancreas, head and neck, reconstructive, GI malignancy, minimally invasive surgery, and clinical epidemiology.

The members are surgical leaders within the University of Calgary and the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, in the province, in Canada and internationally.

Strategic Plan
The most important focus of the division is to provide leading edge care for patients with cancers which include developing new treatments for common cancers and providing surgical expertise for uncommon cancers within the multidisciplinary setting.

Our division also provides unique treatments that are found in very few places in Canada and throughout the world.
These include procedures such as isolated regional limb perfusion for melanoma, peritoneal debulking and interparitoneal chemo therapy for recurrent or metastatic gastrointestinal cancer, advanced surgical techniques for recurrent GI tumors and advanced reconstruction techniques for breast cancer, head and neck cancer, and unique preoperative treatments for sarcomas to reduce local recurrence.

Education
Education is a major part of our activity both at the graduate level and post graduate level developing and promoting our young physicians to choose careers in oncology, a desperately needed expertise throughout our community and our nation.

The division developed the first training program in surgical oncology approved by the Royal College of Physicians & Surgeons of Canada.

In the last 10 years we have graduated surgical oncologists who practice in Canada and North America, Europe and Australia and most have returned to university positions within their communities.

A major commitment of our division is to improve the quality of cancer surgery throughout the province.

This involves running educational sessions for our colleagues in new techniques, supporting our general surgical community dealing with difficult problems and supporting a quality improvement program.

The members are active in the leadership of Cancer Surgery Alberta which involves all surgeons in Alberta. The program is based on a new concept of recording operative and preoperative information with a web based synoptic format. This allows for point of care entry of data providing instantaneous quality measures of surgery and feedback for our surgeons so that they can monitor their practice and compare it to the provincial practice. In addition the format provides seamless incorporation of tumor guidelines.

Research
Our members are heavily invested in research and on average publish 20 - 30 papers yearly and have 7 million dollars of grant funding in both clinical and basic research.

Other
The members have provided leadership provincially and internationally.These include provincial leadership roles in tumor groups and in the Association of Alberta General Surgeons.

The members have been presidents of the many surgical cancer organizations in Canada, and international organizations such as the American Endocrine Society, Society of Pelvic Surgeons and World Federation of Surgical Oncologist Societies.

The success of our division is of course not only due to the individual energies and expertise of its' members, it is also due to the infrastructure provided by the University of Calgary, Departments of Oncology and Surgery, the Alberta Cancer Board soon to be reorganized under the Alberta Health Services, Cancer Corridor.