Reflections on the 2025 Annual Conference

Karen Knight, Executive Director of NAACCR, shares her reflections from the conference, with a call to leadership and working together during uncertain times.

Having returned home from the 2025 Annual Conference in Hartford, CT, my heart is full of gratitude for this amazing community and my mind is full of new ideas, challenges and opportunities. Many thanks to the Connecticut Tumor Registry for hosting our conference in their beautiful city, ensuring excellent weather, and sharing their 90^th anniversary with us! Our conference theme of Honoring the Past, Embracing the Future is one that permeated the talks, formal and informal discussions. Innovation was a theme in both operations and data use talks. The feedback on the scientific content was overwhelmingly positive, thanks to all of the plenary, concurrent, and poster presenters!

In the middle of such excitement about a bright future, I also witnessed the tension and stress about needing to protect the basics of cancer surveillance. U.S. members and partners are grappling with threats to the infrastructure of cancer surveillance and what to do about it. Our CDC and other US and Canadian partners were unable to attend due to new restrictions; some registries were unable to send as large a contingent as in the past. Many registries – even NAACCR – are publicly funded with explicit language that we cannot engage in lobbying or advocacy. However, many of you, and many of our partners are speaking on their own time, with their own resources, with their networks, to advocate for our cancer surveillance system. Thank you for using your voices as you are able!

How do we hold both hope for the future and fight for our very existence at the same time? I have been considering the history of NAACCR – almost 40 years! The founders had a vision for what population-based cancer surveillance could mean if there was a body to coordinate and elevate the work of population-based cancer registries in North America. These visionaries saw the need for coordinated standards for comparability among groups and geographic areas and for efficiency in data collection for clinical, public health and research use. These early leaders came together to set aspirational data measures of excellence for consistency, comparability, and reliability of data collected by certified registries. Together, they met the need of the day and left a legacy we have been successfully building on since.

Our mission remains, to make every cancer count, creating a legacy from the information about each person’s cancer story. For those people and the generations to come, it is our responsibility to ensure the data is complete and their stories used to advance the fight against cancer. And we – the cancer surveillance community – are making that happen. YOU are leaving a legacy, just like the visionaries who came before us. It is a challenging time in our field, no doubt about it, but you matter, what you do matters. We may have to come together in different ways and for different purposes over the coming months and next few years. We may have to refocus on new areas to meet the needs and opportunities of the day. But we can. We can meet the challenge before us, together.