Hi Everyone, we thought you may like to have a preview of some of our plans this year.
The policy and campaigns team are busy planning our activity for Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness Day on Tuesday 13<sup>th</sup> October.
This year we’ll be going to the political party conferences with an exhibition stand focusing on secondary breast cancer. This will give us the opportunity to speak directly with MPs and ministers about secondary breast cancer and how they can help with our campaign. The stand will be staffed by the policy and campaigns team, as well as volunteers who are living with secondary breast cancer. We’ll also be encouraging MPs to donate if they would like a secondary breast cancer pin badge.
We’ll use the political conferences to build momentum as we move towards Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness Day, when we’ll be doing more in Parliament to raise awareness of secondary breast cancer.
We want to make as much of an impact as possible when we announce our plans so if you want to be kept up to date with our campaign please join our campaigns network – we’ll be sending out further information about how to get involved with our secondary breast cancer campaign in September.
Best wishes
Sam
Policy & Campaigns Team
Hi Again
This year we are deliberately widening the coverage of secondary breast cancer awareness beyond just Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness day on October 13<sup>th</sup>. The clinical and digital teams would like to host Live Chat sessions at different times each day throughout that working week (daytime and evening) to enable more people to access this service. As suggested by Live Chat users previously, we thought it would be a good idea to theme each of these. Although we put our heads together and came up with some ideas of themes and topics including some that are a little ‘lighter’, your ideas are the ones that count and we would really like your thoughts and input as forum members!
Please feel free to agree or disagree with our suggestions (!) and also tell us what topics you think would be useful. Also, what time of the day or evening would work best for you? We will do our best to accommodate as many requests as is possible. We will obviously be hosting 5 sessions that week, but any other topics could be carried over into weekly Live Chat if you wish.
Many thanks!
Catherine
Secondary Breast Cancer CNS
Younger women
Making memories
Side effects (general or specific)
Holiday/travel/benefits
Blogging
What not to say/little things that mean a lot……………
Isolation
Managing other people’s emotions
Living well
Intimacy and relationships
nice one pleasant1 I agree. May I add new SBC drugs that are potentially exciting the medical community
wow! you are so right! I really do not understand why more money and research is not going into a cure. More hard hitting marketing of SBC is the only way charties will stop spending money on ‘awareness’ and start lookin g at the real issues : CURES!
I second every word!!
Janette x x x x
Thank you for your comments. We agree that there needs to be research into new treatments for secondary breast cancer. However, as some of you will be aware, Breast Cancer Care is not an organisation that funds research for new treatments. Instead, our aim is to improve the care and support that people living with breast cancer receive. We hear so often, including from the Forum, of the problems people are facing, including not having access to specialist nursing, palliative care, or drugs and treatments that are already available.
Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness Day is an opportunity to shine a spotlight on these issues and this year we will be launching a new campaign to really hammer home the need for government to make secondary breast cancer more of a priority. One of our five policy asks is that everyone has access to the treatments they need. We will be taking our campaign to the political party conferences and then on to Parliament on Secondary Breast Cancer Awareness Day. Following that, we will continue to work with MPs and Ministers to make sure they understand what secondary breast cancer is, what the issues are for people living with the disease, and the solutions to improve care.
There are going to be lots of opportunities to get involved and so I hope you will use these to raise the things that you think are important, including more research into treatments.
In the meantime, please keep posting your thoughts here as we really value your feedback and contributions and use them to help inform our policy and influencing work.
Sam
Policy and Campaigns team
Hi Everyone
Just an update on what is happening. Starting this Sunday our Campaign team are visiting the party political conferences, launching our Our bucket list campaign for secondary breast cancer.
Over the next few weeks the policy and campaigns team will be going to the political party conferences to talk to MPs about secondary breast cancer. You can get involved with our campaign here - bit.ly/1NQI1p2 and keep an eye on our social media pages to see what we’re up to. We’ll be at the Labour conference from this Sunday and the Conservative conference the week after.
You can also fill in your details on our online form to send an email to your MP asking them to visit our secondary breast cancer exhibition stand at the conferences - e-activist.com/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1937&ea.campaign.id=41395
Watch this space for more news and updates.
Best wishes
Anna
Digital Community Officer
Dear BCC team
Contratulations on being awarded the ‘Best Exhibition Stand’, that must have helped to draw attention to our cause, and thank you for your work to raise awareness of secondary/metastatic breast cancer.
Good luck next week.
Flo
I am concerned that metastatic disease may be going undiagnosed leading to a delay in appropriate treatment.
I would wish to see added to your campaign a move towards mandatory observance of NICE guidelines on metastatic disease throughout the country to minimise delayed diagnoses in metastatic disease patients.
Thank you.