Newsblog
How do you reach more than 30,000 people with the vital breast awareness message?
For us last year part of the answer was by working with a Scottish Government health promotion campaign Detect Cancer Early. Our Breast Health Promotion (BHP) team delivered bespoke training courses to staff working on the campaign.
Equipped with the knowledge from our training course and backed by a hard-hitting advertising campaign starring actress Elaine C Smith, the DCE team went on to reach thousands with information about the importance of breast awareness and early detection of breast cancer.
Reducing health inequality
At Breast Cancer Care we’re committed to ensuring women and men receive and understand the importance of the breast awareness/early detection message, especially people at high risk of breast cancer and with poorer breast cancer awareness.
Our BHP team of health promotion specialists delivers a range of breast awareness training courses for healthcare professionals and community workers/volunteers. We use health education and promotion to cascade the breast awareness/early detection message and reduce health inequalities.
Tools, knowledge and confidence
The BHP team has been delivering courses since developing the flagship Train the Trainer: Breast Health Promotion in 2008. The portfolio of training courses now includes one for people who support women with learning disabilities, half-day practice nurse sessions and bespoke courses tailored to the needs of individual organisations, such as the course delivered to DCE staff.
The aim of each is to equip people with the tools, knowledge and confidence to reach their communities with this vital message. Trainees have included heath champions, screening staff, commissioners, school nurses, health promotion staff and specialist nurses from organisations including the NHS, Cancer Research UK, Macmillan Cancer Support and Coppafeel.
Getting better all the time
We’ve now introduced a new course accredited by the Open College Network. The response to it has been overwhelming. People from a variety of sectors have applied for places on courses across the UK, including some who’ve been on previous courses and can see the added value of re-training at an accredited level.
A further collaborative training project is a Department of Health-funded joint course with Bowel Cancer UK. This delivers a dual breast/bowel cancer awareness message to key groups. It’s already exceeded targets for numbers of trainees on the course and the number of people who are then reached through the trainees.
In 2013 the BHP team is focusing on areas of social deprivation and low breast screening uptake.
‘Every session was very useful to me. I have more knowledge on breast screening and cancer thanks to you.’ Trainee
Find out more
A Strawberry Tea is the perfect excuse to catch up with loved ones this summer and indulge in a much-loved British tradition of tea and cake!
Last year Suzanne from West Yorkshire held a Strawberry Tea at her home. This followed her breast cancer diagnosis in 2011 at the age of 39.
‘My diagnosis left me feeling shocked and anxious about the future. I attended Breast Cancer Care’s Younger Women’s Forum and it was brilliant. It gave me the opportunity to ask lots of questions while meeting other women in a similar situation. I decided to hold a Strawberry Tea as I wanted to raise money to ensure that other people could receive similar free support from Breast Cancer Care.
'The Strawberry Tea event was wonderful – the only problem was we had too many cakes! Friends and family came to support me and we had games, a raffle and even sold pin badges. Everyone was so generous. A Strawberry Tea is a great way to raise lots of money while catching up with friends and family. If anyone else is thinking about holding one I’d tell them to go for it.’
It doesn’t matter if you raise £20 or £200 at your Strawberry Tea because every penny counts. Sign up and we’ll send you a fundraising kit with ideas, posters, invites and much more to get you started.
What do Breast Cancer Care volunteers do for us? Well, apart from delivering one-to-one support for people with breast cancer, breast health promotion, running HeadStrong sessions, keeping our hospital Information Points stocked, office and planning work of all sorts, raising funds, helping out with events…
With around 800 volunteers engaged in a huge range of activities, the roll-call goes on and on. Quite literally, we couldn’t begin to do our work without them: they are the foundation and heart of Breast Cancer Care.
But the list at the top is from our perspective. How our volunteers describe their role can be a lot more human, as we discovered when we asked some of them at one of our networking and training conferences in May.
During a seminar session with some of the women – themselves with breast cancer diagnoses – who offer support to people at our free Moving Forward courses, here were some of the things they felt they bring:
- empathy and validation for the emotional issues that so many people face once they’ve finished hospital-based treatment for breast cancer
- ability to pass on stories, experiences and subtle humour
- a personal perspective to set against the clinical whirlwind of diagnosis and treatment
- the much-needed encouragement of simply seeing a survivor
- someone of whom it’s OK to ask supposedly silly, non-medical questions
- positivity and smiles
- skills and tips, both from other services, such as HeadStrong, and personal experience
- encouraging friendships and mutual ongoing support groups.
Willing and helpful volunteers are vital to support staff delivering our services, with a few roles needing people with relevant experience of breast cancer.
In addition, our volunteers highlighted a long list of skills and experience they've found useful. For example: being a good listener, communicator, mediator and observer; compassionate, empathetic; patient; approachable; welcoming; trained [by us]; consistent; thick-skinned; boundaried; knowledgeable; and with a good sense of humour.
No wonder they’re collective gold.
If you’d like to join this inspirational team, check out our current opportunities. We’d love to hear from you.
As a breast care nurse working mainly on our Helpline and Ask the Nurse email service, most of the enquiries I deal with are from women. That’s because nearly 55,000 women develop breast cancer in UK each year compared to around 400 men.
Being in a minority such as this creates problems on top of the difficulties of being diagnosed with breast cancer.
Men who have been diagnosed often report feeling very isolated: they may never meet another man with breast cancer; the hospital waiting room will be filled with women; much of the patient information is geared towards women and almost all the medical research focuses on women. Even the ribbons are pink.
As the charity Men’s Health Forum is highlighting for Men’s Health Week 10-16 June, men are notoriously bad at seeking help for health-related issues. And it can be hard to tell other people that you have what is perceived as a woman’s illness.
In touch with other men
On our free Helpline we can talk through these issues and give up-to-date medical information. We may also point men towards other sources of support, such as our One-to-One Support service or our web-based Discussion Forum. Through both, men can be in touch with other men with breast cancer who may share some of their experiences.
We also have a free resource pack written specifically for men with breast cancer.
Look out for changes
Most men don’t realise that they have breast tissue (most of it directly behind the nipple) and that breast awareness is important for them too. This might be one reason why they are often diagnosed with breast cancer at a later stage than women.
I spoke to a man recently who had found a lump but hadn’t yet seen his GP. He didn’t think it possible the lump could be breast cancer and didn’t want to waste his doctor’s time. Luckily, he was concerned enough to ring us.
For men and women alike, it’s important to know what’s normal for you, look at and feel your chest and under your arms regularly. Report any unusual changes to your GP as soon as possible. Things to look out for include a lump, nipple changes or discharge, ulceration or swelling of the breast and any lumps or swelling under the arms.
Our services are open to anyone affected by breast cancer so please feel free to ring the Helpline on 0808 800 6000, or email us if you need information or support about breast cancer or breast health, either for yourself or if a loved one has been diagnosed with breast cancer. We will do our very best to help you.
The people behind the numbers
We want every person affected by breast cancer to receive the best treatment, information and support, with all our work aimed at making that vision a reality.
We keep careful track of what we do so we can be sure we’re making progress, as you’ll be able to read in our upcoming Annual Report. Some of the numbers are impressive.
For example, in the past financial year we distributed nearly a million items of free breast health and breast cancer information, while our website had 1.5 million unique visitors.
Wonderful magazine
But the figures really come to life when the people who use our services tell us about their experiences. Such as the woman who reported how she discovered our breast cancer magazine Vita while waiting to see a psychologist to discuss her worries following breast cancer treatment.
She said: ‘I felt that it [Vita] was there just waiting for me to pick it up, as some of the stories there could have been me.
‘This is a wonderful magazine and I wish more people going through breast cancer knew about it.’
Felt so much better
It was also lovely to hear from Susan Aitchison, who was at one of our Moving Forward courses.
These free four-week courses help people adjust to life after treatment, which we know can be a difficult time for many. As Susan says: ‘You think you should be feeling amazing, but it isn’t like that. I felt like a security blanket had been pulled away.’
Susan’s course was run by us in partnership with NHS Lanarkshire, on whose website her story appears.
She adds: ‘[The course] has helped me move forward with my life. I was so excited about going and afterwards I felt so much better.’
So while we’re delighted to see big numbers in our progress reports, it’s people who bring home the reality behind the information that, for instance, almost 5,000 women were able to be at a Moving Forward session during 2012-13.
You can help
In the end, what we do is not about numbers but about the support and information we can give to the individual woman faced with the devastating news that she has breast cancer; or to the family member trying to make it through the pain of watching a loved one brought low by chemotherapy.
But we couldn’t do it without the money sent in by our supporters. So if you’d like to help us be there so that no-one has to face breast cancer alone, please use the donate button below.
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