o ensure MPs and members of the House of Lords know about Breast Cancer Care and the work we do we held an event at the House of Commons.
To ensure MPs and members of the House of Lords know about Breast Cancer Care and the work we do we held an event at the House of Commons last Tuesday. Such events are vitally important so that we can call on these influential people to keep breast cancer on the political health agenda.
They are also an opportunity for us to remind policy-makers that we can help out when they want to understand what people living with breast cancer are experiencing.
About 25 MPs and members of the Lords attended the event along with some of the people who use our services and some of our volunteers. They helped us to drive home our main message:
Breast Cancer Care is the only UK-wide specialist breast cancer support charity
There was a great buzz in the room and many MPs commented that our staff and volunteers were obviously passionate about Breast Cancer Care.
Mike Freer MP who hosted the event captured the essence and importance of Breast Cancer Care in his speech. He also tweeted encouraging people to watch our body image film which was shown at the event.
Chair of our trustees Jane Hinnrichs and Chief Executive Samia al Qadhi
The Chair of our Board of Trustees Jane Hinnrichs spoke about how we reached more than 66000 people through our face-to-face phone and online services last year and had contact with over 4.2 million with people affected by breast cancer.
Jane said that despite a recent radio report that 'breast cancer has so many resources thrown at it the job is done for breast cancer' we know from our experience of talking to and supporting people diagnosed with breast cancer that the job’s definitely not done.
Many MPs who have never worked with us before offered to help us in the future and contributed to the Twitter discussion #thejobsnotdone. We’ll be thanking those who attended and keeping the relationships going.
We plan to go back to Westminster in 2014 to talk about two policy reports we are working on and ask for help in implementing our recommendations. The reports look at the patient perspective on:
- value-based pricing and access to drugs both for people with primary and secondary breast cancer
- body image sexuality and intimacy.
Mike Freer MP host of our parliamentary event
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