Living with Cancer Team - a national success!

Earlier this year the Living with Cancer Team were approached by Macmillan Cancer Support and asked to broadcast a webinar to the Macmillan community country-wide on Personalised Care and Support planning. The team were recognised in 2022 as a great example of putting personalised approaches into practice across an Integrated Care System, when they were awarded a Macmillan Excellence award in the Integration category at the Macmillan Professionals Conference. After much preparation the webinar was broadcast live on 12^th October 2023 to an audience of 60 people.

Although we wanted everyone in the team to talk about their contribution to Personalisation, we decided it would be best for Kathie McPeake and Steph Wilkes from the ICB and Sam Lewis and Becci Pallett from ULHT to speak. The rest of the team took part in a Q&A at the end of webinar.

The webinar kicked off with an overview of the Living with Cancer Programme, and our approach, from Kathie. Kathie’s overall message was that personalisation should be applied right along cancer pathways, and by working together we are better than the sum of our parts when supporting patients. Steph, Becci and Sam then took over, and talked about Personalised Care and Support Planning itself, how to do a great one and how it can be used throughout a patient’s cancer experience. They used a fictitious patient as an example (but with real-world challenges that patients have faced) and showed how all sectors in Lincolnshire, working together, could support him to improve his experience and he and his family’s quality of life.

Q&A followed and we were surprised at how many people asked questions. We were able to answer all the questions either live or after the session. Several people got in touch afterwards and we have sent examples of our work and met with some of them. Macmillan told us afterwards that they have never had such an engaged audience, which was great to hear.

Kathie added "thank you LWC team for today and every day, for leading the way on personalised approaches and working so hard to improve the quality of life for people living with cancer in our county".

You can find out more about Macmillan and their approaches to personalisation by visiting this website: Education and Training | Healthcare professionals | Macmillan Cancer Support