Welcome to a quick update of the London cancer support and engagement forum. The group is for those caring for someone diagnoised with Cancer. Just a quick message regarding a carer. A carer is anyone who cares, unpaid, for a friend or family member who due to illness, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction cannot cope without their support.
My focus on carers are those caring for someone with mental ill health or cancer. For the September group, which is run online we were joined by some new carer members. One was from NHS England giving support to the new group. We started off with a peer session as those caring for someone with cancer wanted to share their experiences. Most members who attended had loved ones recieving pallative care due to the late stages of cancer.
We then had our guest speaker who kindly engaged are carer members. The speaker was Gabrielle Brown who spoke about her paper “How pancreatic cancer impacts carers in the UK: why do we know so little?”.
Gabrielle Brown is the Staff Nurse, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
Her paper sourced in the British Journal of Community Nursing . Jun 2023 looks at how Pancreatic cancer is a disease with poor life expectancy and high symptom burden.
The experiences of the spouses, family and friends who care for this group is poorly understood, especially during palliative care and within the UK.
The Aim of the paper is to highlight the current gaps within research and provide some insight into the challenges faced by carers assisting those living with pancreatic cancer, and how community nurses can support this group.
Gabrielle talked about the number of unpaid carers and how important they are to health and social care. She mentioned the World Health Organisation guidelines and the challenges of them being followed. There needs to be offered need assessments for both carers and patients.
Gabrielle pointed to the recent Carers UK survey which highlighted a lack of support for carers. She then mentioned the situation pallative care discharge issues and what here paper raised regarding carer guilt and grief, especially if their loved one had a short life span due to cancer.
When agressive cancer does strike, it shows the carer had a lack of time to adjust and this ends with an increased level of anxiety and depression.
The group were interested in the talk and raised several questions. This concludes a brief update of my London cancer caregiver forum.
You can find out more of Gabrielle’s paper below.
A Caring Mind 