BC Cancer Foundation - Vancouver Island Centre: For infomation on current fundraising events in the community please refer to the BC Cancer Foundation's Vancouver Island events listing.

BC Cancer Agency: You will find information on events the BC Cancer Agency is running, sponsoring and/or supporting here: Coming Events

BC Cancer Agency’s Telecare Program: Cancer patients living in central and northern Vancouver Island may now be able to attend an appointment with their cancer specialists at the BC Cancer Agency’s Vancouver Island Centre (VIC) in Victoria with the new remote access TeleCare units located in their community hospital. Donations from the Lions and Lioness Clubs across Vancouver Island to the BC Cancer Foundation funded six mobile videoconferencing units now located in Nanaimo, Campbell River, Comox, Port Alberni, Port Hardy hospitals and the Vancouver Island Centre. In addition, two other mobile units are located in Port McNeill and on Comorant Island.

Telecare is the use of videoconferencing technology to link people to health care expertise at a distance. You are able to see, hear and talk to the person at the distant site. Telecare enables those living in rural and remote areas to receive specialized healthcare while remaining in their home community. Reducing the need to travel to Victoria for an in-person consultation with an oncology specialist can relieve some of the physical, emotional and financial burden placed on patients who live up-Island. More than half of the patients receiving care and treatment at the Vancouver Island Centre live north of Duncan.

Top

PREDICT: The First Research Program of its Kind in Canada: Researchers want to answer questions such as: "If two people have exactly the same treatment for exactly the same cancer, why does one person experience side effects while the other one doesn't?"

PREDICT (Personal Response Determinants in Cancer Therapy) is the first Canadian cancer centre-wide program that invites every newly referred patient with cancer to participate in a research study. Patients with any sort of cancer are eligible. The goal of the research is to identify host factors that influence the occurrence of cancer or the outcome of cancer treatment.

The program requires the collection of one blood sample from newly diagnosed patients who are referred to VIC and who have consented to be involved in this research.  PREDICT is helping researchers learn more, through the study of these blood samples, about how individuals interact with their cancers.