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On 15–16 June 2023, healthcare professionals and breast cancer patients and advocates from across Canada met in Toronto, Ontario, for the 2023 Canadian Breast Cancer Symposium (CBSC.). The CBSC. is a national, multidisciplinary event that occurs every 2 years with the goal of developing a personalized approach to the management of breast cancer in Canada. Experts provided state-of-the-art information to help optimally manage breast cancer patients, including etiology, prevention, diagnosis, experimental biology, and therapy of breast cancer and premalignant breast disease. The symposium also had the objectives of increasing communication and collaboration among breast cancer healthcare providers nationwide and providing a comprehensive and real-life review of the many facets of breast cancer. The sessions covered the patient voice, the top breast cancer papers from different disciplines in 2022, artificial intelligence in breast cancer, systemic therapy updates, the management of central nervous system metastases, multidisciplinary management of ductal carcinoma in situ, special populations, optimization-based individual prognostic factors, toxicity management of novel therapeutics, survivorship, and updates in surgical oncology. The key takeaways of these sessions have been summarized in this conference report.

Rapid and efficient communication regarding quickly evolving medical information was paramount for healthcare providers and patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last several years, social media platforms such as Twitter have emerged as important tools for health promotion, virtual learning among healthcare providers, and patient support. We conducted a qualitative thematic content analysis on tweets using the hashtags #BreastSurgery, #BreastCancer, #BreastOncology, #Pandemic, and #COVID19. Advocacy organizations were the most frequent authors of tweets captured in this dataset, and most tweets came from the United States of America (64%). Seventy-three codes were generated from the data, and, through iterative, inductive analysis, three major themes were developed: patient hesitancy and vulnerability, increased efforts in knowledge sharing, and evolving best practices. We found that Twitter was an effective way to share evolving best practices, education, and collective experiences among key stakeholders. As Twitter is increasingly used as a tool for health promotion and knowledge translation, a better understanding of how key stakeholders engage with healthcare-related topics on the platform can help optimize the use of this powerful tool.

Background: Peer to peer learning is a well-established learning modality which has been shown to improve learning outcomes, with positive implications for clinical practice. Surgical students from across Ireland were invited to upload learning points daily while paired with their peers in a peer-reviewing process. This study was designed to assess content accuracy and evaluate the benefit of the review process. Method: A reflective content sample was selected from the database representing all gastrointestinal (GI) surgical entries. All questions and answers were double corrected by four examiners, blinded to the “review” status of the entries. Statistical analysis was performed to compare accuracy between “reviewed” and “non-reviewed” entries. Results: There were 15,569 individual entries from 2009–2013, 2977 were GI surgery entries; 678 (23%) were peer reviewed. Marked out of 5, accuracy in the reviewed group was 4.24 and 4.14 in the non-reviewed group. This was not statistically different (p = 0.11). Accuracy did not differ between universities or grade of tutors. Conclusion: The system of student uploaded data is accurate and was not improved further through peer review. This represents an easy, valuable and safe method of capturing surgical oral ward based teaching.