Thanks to you, we are leading the way
Last updated 19:24, Thursday, 07 February 2008
IN an ideal world, progressive health care services would come from a proactive partnership of enthusiastically involved community, specialist medical expertise and enabling NHS management.
Welcome to our world. North Cumbria has become the first place in the UK to launch a specialist clinic for breast cancer patients on the potentially life saving drug Herceptin.
These patients, though pinning hopes of recovery on a necessary treatment for early stage cancer, risk serious side-effect heart problems which can arise when Herceptin is used. As a result, it is recommended that hospitals offer three-monthly heart check-ups.
But Carlisle’s Cumberland Infirmary is going several steps further than that. Doctors there have launched a unique clinic that will set an example to hospitals nationally. Cardiology and oncology teams have joined together to launch a weekly Echo-Herceptin clinic, dedicated solely to breast cancer patients undergoing continuing drug therapy. Women from north and west Cumbria will be able to have a detailed heart assessment and full review of their cancer treatment in one appointment.
And you made that happen. The clinic has been made possible after Cumberland News readers raised £318,000 to buy the new heart scanning technology for our hospitals.
Community drove the solution, then medical and technical expertise enabled hospital management to bring everything together in a pioneering clinic on which the eyes of health professionals nationally are now enviously focused.
Identification of a life-threatening problem won’t always lead to development of the most logical solution in the cash-strapped NHS.
But collaboration between generously concerned community and health specialists with the best interests of patients at the forefront of their professional thinking can and will make just about anything possible.
That’s not miracle working. It’s making the most of the stakeholder’s responsibility we each hold for raising our health service to the best it can be.
