News & Events
October 2004
20th: To read the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s news release about CanThrive, click here.
February 2005
5th: The CanThrive Team participates in the 2005 Franklin 5K in Chapel Hill to raise funds for Breast Cancer Research at Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. For a picture of the CanThrive Team before the race, click here.
June 2005
11th: The CanThrive Team participates in the Komen NC Triangle Race for the Cure in Raleigh, NC to raise funds for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
June 2006
9th: The CanThrive Team participates in the Komen NC Triangle Race for the Cure in Raleigh, NC to raise funds for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.
Summer 2007
CanThrive Presented as Exemplary Program
Dr. Donald Baucom, Director of the CanThrive project, recently returned from a small conference of select couple researchers from around the world meeting in Zurich, Switzerland. The purpose of the meeting was to set an agenda for couple-based interventions for the next decade internationally.
Dr. Baucom discussed the importance of working with couples rather than individuals when one partner experiences a health problem such as cancer.
He described CanThrive as an example of how such programs can be offered to couples in the community. There was strong consensus that working with couples addressing cancer and other health problems will be a vital part of couple-based interventions in the coming years.
The value of programs such as CanThrive is being recognized in other countries as well. After consulting with the CanThrive team, some of our colleagues in Germany received funding from the German government to conduct a similar program there. Along with those colleagues, we recently received funding from the German Humboldt Foundation to compare our findings across these two cultures. The upcoming results will allow us to clarify what is helpful to couples universally when they are confronting breast cancer.
May 2008
Our major goal of CanThrive is to serve you, the couples who are experiencing breast cancer. Another important goal for us is to share our work with other professionals so that services such as these can become available to couples elsewhere. We do this through making presentations, writing journal articles, and book chapters about our work and findings. In the past few months, we have two new journal articles that tell the CanThrive story and some of our findings about what is important as couples address breast cancer together as a team. We also recently completed a book chapter on how to help couples approach a wide range of health problems together, using CanThrive as our major example. And we are ready to share our findings at major upcoming conferences. In June, we will present some of our results at the National Cancer Institute's Survivorship Conference in Atlanta. Then in July, we will travel to Berlin, Germany to give a talk on CanThrive at the International Congress of Psychology. While in Germany, we will meet with our German colleagues who are conducting a similar study offering services to couples with breast cancer. The Humboldt Foundation in Germany is supporting our efforts to explore how such services are helpful to couples across countries, and possible adaptations that might need to be made based on cultural and health care differences across countries.
All of this is happening as we head into our fifth year of CanThrive. We will continue to provide our services to more couples, develop new ideas, and write additional grants to provide services to couples approaching cancer. On a personal note, I am delighted that UNC has granted me a sabbatical for the 2008-09 academic year. This will allow me to focus even more of my time and energy on CanThrive and looking to the future for how we can broaden our assistance to couples. Our staff of physicians, psychologists, social workers, graduate students, and undergraduates is greatly devoted to our work with you, and we thank you for sharing your lives with us. We are always open to your ideas and input of how we can serve couples more effectively or what was particularly valuable to you.
