“How are you?” and “How are you?” look the same when written down but they are very different questions. The first is the one where you respond by saying: “Good thanks, how about you?” It’s the one where it’s about politeness but no-one really wants to hear a proper answer. The second is the one that the NHS needs to get better at if the personal cancer plans are a success.
As a quick recap for anyone who missed the news at the start of the month, after a long campaign by the Daily Express the Health Secretary Wes Streeting pledged that all cancer patients will have a personal cancer plan. This will cover all aspects of their lives with the gruelling disease, from treatment, to mental health, to employment and benefits, and so on.
This will involve medical teams actually asking cancer patients how they are, instead of just treating them like a series of blood test results. They’ll need to treat them like a person, not just a patient.
It’s something my world-leading cancer hospital (as a recap for anyone new here – I have incurable bowel cancer) definitely doesn’t excel at. But I do have a glimmer of hope.
During a recent telephone conversation with a dermatology clinical nurse specialist she asked me not just about the cracks in the skin on my hands and the redness on my face. She also asked: “And how are you doing in yourself?”
I remarked that she’s the only person in the entire hospital that’s ever asked me such a question. Then when I asked her what she’d do if I said I was struggling she said she’d refer me on to someone who could support me.
She’s asked similar questions before. Not because it’s her job but because she understands that cancer treatment, especially the visual side effects that she’s working to ameliorate, is a mental slog as well as a physical one.
If she gets it then surely other people in cancer hospitals can be trained to get it to?
It made me think of the children’s charity Barnardo’s. They always used to say that children need one trusted adult to tell their problems to.
It’s the same for adults going through cancer treatment. They need at least one trusted adult in their medical team that can be there when the tough times come and keep coming.
In my medical team I really don’t know who that would be. It requires a level of trust that I’m not sure I have in them, even after two-and-a-half years of treatment.
This is why when it comes to any issues I’ll always go and have a chat with my GP. I’m not the only reason why you can’t get an appointment but consultations rarely take less than the 10 minutes I’m told they are supposed to take.
When the personal cancer plans come in I’ll need to establish a similar level of trust with someone in my medical team, with someone who knows how the cancer is slowly destroying me.
It will be a massive challenge for the NHS to shift from asking “How are you?” to asking “How are you?” and it will be a challenge for patients like me too.
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
