On Tuesday 23rd of May we attended the Oncology Professional Care conference at the Excel in London with two of our Voices, Roger and Laura. This conference is dedicated to the professional development of healthcare professionals working in oncology. This includes nurses, surgeons, oncologists and many other cancer support workers.
It was a great chance for us to engage with professionals who work with people affected by breast cancer every day but may not have heard of Breast Cancer Now and the work we do.
As part of this event, we presented a speaker session which we called Here for you - meeting breast cancer patients' and healthcare professionals' support needs together.
Through this session we wanted to share how our support services are developed in response to the needs of people diagnosed with breast cancer and why accessing this support is so important.
We invited Laura and Roger to speak about their experiences of having breast cancer. They spoke alongside our head of patient experience (Cat Wood) and our clinical nurse specialist for family history (Cassie Kingswell). We knew that the best people to get our message across are people with lived experience of breast cancer.
Laura and Roger joined us for a Q&A session with Cassie to share their experiences and views on the importance of support services and personalised care. Thy spoke for around 15 minutes, but we could have carried on much longer!
The audience of over 100 healthcare professionals were really engaged in our session, particularly when Roger and Laura spoke. At the end one clinical nurse specialist told us she would be changing her practice because of what they shared about the importance of really listening to what patients say, rather than making assumptions based on age, sexuality, gender or background.
We had many visitors to our stand saying just how much of an impact Laura and Roger’s insights had for them personally.
We’ve also been invited to speak at a women’s health event as the organiser saw our session and was so impressed by the impact their stories had on the audience.
Roger and Laura also told us how much it meant to them to be able to speak at the conference
It was such a pleasure to be part of the powerful BCN’s presentation on Tuesday and thank you so much for the opportunity. So many thanks for providing us with such a memorable time. I’m especially glad that the feedback was positive. For me it was the first time to be able to speak to a meeting about breast cancer in men and I felt that it was not only a privilege but also a wonderful opportunity.
Roger
It was a privilege to be involved and an absolute pleasure to meet Roger and the rest of Breast Cancer now team. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be involved, I really enjoyed it and am so pleased to hear that professionals said it would help them change their practice - that’s pretty powerful stuff.
Laura
We want to thank Laura and Roger for their time, professionalism and passion that helped make our talk one of the stand-out sessions at the conference. We wouldn’t have made such an impact without them, and it was fantastic to be able to showcase our support services through the patient voices.
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