11 What inspired you to start the Prostate Cancer Foundation? Back in 2005 I was chatting to one of the pharmaceutical brand managers at the time, Bev Pretorius from Sano, and we realised that there was a real vacuum in terms of the knowledge of prostate cancer amongst not only the general public, but also amongst GP's. There was a desperate need to raise awareness about the importance of early detection in order to move the diagnostic line back to the point when the disease is potentially curable. We were losing too many otherwise healthy men to a potentially curable disease because of ignorance, and that was the initial drive that inspired us to start the organisation. We linked up with some of the other prostate cancer foundations in Australia and the UK to nd out how they had gone about establishing their organisations and launched The Prostate Cancer Foundation of South Africa in 2007. In the past few years, the Prostate Cancer Foundation has gained a lot more recognition, what do you attribute this to? The Foundation has gone from strength to strength in the past few years. Having strong leadership in the executive board, with clear vision has been critical. But the Foundation grew to a point where we needed someone fulltime to manage it, and we appointed Andrew Oberholzer as the CEO in 2011. This made a huge difference and enabled the organisation to sort out all of the compliance issues which a board of volunteers simply doesn't have time for. Under Andrew's leadership the organisation has blossomed. The organization was restructured around 2014 into three separate divisions, a Medical and Scientic Advisory Board comprising of the healthcare professionals involved in diagnosing and treating prostate cancer, a Patient Affairs Board where prostate cancer survivors can get involved, and a Marketing Board where pharmaceutical and medical corporate members have representation. This enabled us to have a more focused approach, and we have been better able to identify the needs of each group and develop programmes and strategies to meet these. The prostate cancer landscape is changing rapidly, what do you think will be the biggest game changer in the diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer in the next 10 years? The technology in all the different treatment arms is evolving rapidly. This includes surgery, pharmacology and radiation. However, the biggest game changer is likely to be genetic sequencing which will enable us to select the patients that really need treatment and manage other patients more conservatively. I think that we are already quite far down the road with this, but it's still very expensive. This will hopefully change in the next 10 years and genetic sequencing will be more affordable and therefore more widely available. As one of the busiest surgeons in South Africa, how have you managed to balance, work, family and recreation? There's denitely a price to pay and I haven't always been able to spend as much time with my family as I would have liked to. We weren't able to take long breaks at the end of the year, but instead opted for lots of short high impact, high quality breaks. I must give a lot of credit to my wife, who is a strong and independent person and who was able to to take on a lot of the responsibility for bringing up our kids when I couldn't be there. I have a lot of interests and when I turned 50, I tackled the challenge of obtaining a pilot's licence and then a commercial pilot's licence. This was a great diversion. My wife and I love the bush and enjoy wildlife photography. We have been lucky to visit a lot of interesting places including the Arctic. We also enjoy y shing and have visited some of the best y shing areas in the world. Dr Lance Coetzee taking some time out to land a 110cm Goliath Tiger Fish UROLOGY, URO-ONCOLOGY AND SEXOLOGY UPDATE
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