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NCRA Focuses on Future

By Heather Hogstrom

The National Cancer Registrars Association’s (NCRA) 41st Annual Educational Conference will be held in San Antonio May 20-23. Featuring the theme “On a Mission: Education for a Changing Environment,” the NCRA conference is preparing cancer registrars for changes in the field and making sure they are up to date, including being ready to transition from collaborative stage to directly coded stage. As the conference looks toward the future, Keynote Speaker Clement Bezold, PhD, chairman and cofounder of the Institute for Alternative Futures, has plenty of insight to offer as a “health futurist” and author of several books on the future of health.

Attendees have the opportunity to earn more than 18 CEs and can choose sessions from six tracks: central cancer registry, data analysis and use, hospital, professional development, registry management, and site-specific. A few workshops are also available. The preconference workshop, SEER: 2015 Advanced Topics for Registry Professionals, expands knowledge about the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program. The Fundamentals of Abstracting workshop will provide new registrars with abstracting experience during the conference, while the Cancer Informatics for Registrars: From Bedside to Big Data workshop will be held the day after the conference. Attendees planning to take the Certified Tumor Registrar (CTR) exam in the summer or fall can prepare during the postconference One-Day Intensive CTR Exam Prep workshop.

An app is available on iTunes and Google Play that will provide conference information such as the schedule and session descriptions. After signing in to the app, users can enter the code “NCRA2015.”

For more information and to register, visit www.ncra-usa.org.

— Heather Hogstrom is an editorial assistant at For The Record.