This is a transcript of the video: Team introductions – how we can help and support you.

Hello. Hello everyone. We’ll get started. Hi everyone. My name is Amy Wilson. I’m the Macmillan Information and Support manager and welcome today to our Gynae Health and Wellbeing event. Thank you so much for for being here today. One of our biggest ambitions in cancer services is improving the follow-up and ongoing support for people affected by Gynae cancer.

So that really is the purpose of today’s event, to provide you with additional education and information about how to manage and improve your own health in a way that suits you, tips on what to look out for should you be concerned and who to contact if you are. And also you can see all across the room, there’s a few people couldn’t make it today but some charities as well.

We’ll be mentioning them a wee bit later on as well. So we have an exciting programme planned for you today with informative talks from our Gynae cancer team. And we have our lovely patient rep here today, Frances, who’s going to share her journey with fallopian tube cancer. So thank you so much Frances, for being here today. It’s not easy.

So thank you so much. We are recording today’s event so you’ll see the scary cameras at the back, but I want to just reassure you that it is just our mugs up here who are going to be recorded. It won’t be yourselves. So if you do want to see this event again, and you think to yourself, gosh, I want to see that all over again, then you can and it will be on the cancer services website.

So if you would like a link after the event, then please head over to, you’ll see the flower display over there, someone will be sitting there to take your names and we’ll send you the link to the recording. So hello to anyone listening at home. We do want you to keep any questions to either the break time or at the end and approach staff there because we just we won’t be able to take any questions live. Just some housekeeping. There is no plan for a fire alarm, so if you do hear a fire alarm, fingers crossed not, the emergency exits are just here to the left. There’s one out the back here and just back where you came in as well.

I feel like an air hostess, but that’s where that’s where you can get those and toilets hopefully you will have seen those whenever you came in. So just head on out there and then to the left for the toilets. Please do silence your mobiles, the production team will thank me for that one. I know we’d love to hear some interesting ring tones,

I don’t even think they exist anymore really, but please do silence those for us. There is water available, so please do avail of that at any time. And at the break there will be tea, coffee, scones and fruit. Ooh so we can look forward to that. Whenever you came in you got a wee pack and inside that pack there’s an agenda of the talks and the speakers today.

There’s a wee evaluation form which I will talk to you about at the end, there’s a pen, there’s a summary of the charity tables around the room, there’s key messages as well so that’s just key information that we want you really to take away and take home today. And we actually have a scarf in there from Scamp and Dude, they donated some scarves to the event and it’s coming into that time of year. So, thank you very much to Scamp and Dude for that and some sweets, because we wanted to treat you. All right. So once again, thank you for being here today and for your commitment to improving your health and wellbeing. I hope you find today’s event informative, engaging and empowering.

And now we go to our first speaker to Shauna McMillan. Over to Shauna.

This is the clicker, thank you.

Hello everybody. So yes my name’s Shauna I’m going to introduce myself properly in just a second, but I want to start out doing something a wee bit different today. All you ladies are here off the back of a gynae cancer diagnosis and as a consequence of that, you’re probably used to having your body scanned, whether that be CTs, MRIs.

So I want to start by doing that. And I want to scan your body in a very different but equally very effective way in order to support your health and wellbeing.

So if you’re comfortable enough to do so, and that includes family, friends, all these amazing ladies here today, colleagues, everybody, I want to invite you to close your eyes. And take a big, deep breath in through your nose and out through your mouth.

I want you to bring your awareness to the top of your head, over your forehead, your eyebrows, the small muscles that surround your eyes, your cheeks and jaw.

And try and release any tension that you’re holding over the facial muscles. Allow that feeling to feed down through the neck and over the shoulders.

And just allow the shoulders to roll back into the frame of the body.

Bring your awareness now to the tops of your arms, down through your elbows, your forearms, hands and fingers and try to allow the upper limbs to become limp.

Notice the rise and fall of your chest as you breathe in and out and how your abdomen mimics that same rhythmic upward and downward motion.

And on your next exhale, try and release any tension that you’re holding over the belly and pelvic floor. Bring your awareness now to your lower limbs, your thighs, your knees, your shins and calf muscles. And just allowing the lower limbs to become limp. And now your very important feet, your feet that have walked you through this journey so far, and your feet that have walked you here today.

Try to release any tension that you’re holding over the feet, toe by toe.

And in your own time I want to invite you to take one more big, deep breath in through your nose, out through your mouth and whenever you’re ready, just open your eyes.

Still with me? Thank you for doing that, ladies. That was in part a selfish endeavor because I’ve never done this talk before, and it was a really good way of helping me calm down. So it’s something that you can all add to your toolkit, and I hope that you do. So yes, like I said, my name is Shauna and I am very new to the gynae oncology team in the Northern Trust.

Starting just in January, I work alongside Patricia who we have here. And Patricia I’m sure every one of you will know because she will have been instrumental in your diagnosis and treatment. We also work with a lovely lady here called Vera. Vera is known as our support worker and she does a lot of our administrative work.

And often if you phone up Vera will answer the phone and let us know that you need help or support, and we’ll call you back ASAP. We are very fortunate that we work with a team of amazing doctors and I’m sure you all recognise these gentlemen. We have Dr Quinn, who you’re going to be hearing from pretty soon, Dr Douglas, Dr Chandranath and Dr Dorman.

One of these guys undoubtedly will have had the awful task of giving you your diagnosis. But equally, the absolute privilege of being able to support you in that and advocate and guide you through that. So that’s the team, everybody. But for the purposes of today’s talk, I want to focus on the role that Patricia and I do.

So we’re known as your nurse or your key worker. I’ve kind of listed here what our role entails, but it’s certainly not restricted to that. One of the key things that we do throughout your journey and your diagnosis is offer you a holistic needs assessment, and that is a really important piece of all of this, because that gives you a safe and supportive environment and an opportunity for us to identify where this diagnosis is having an impact at on your life.

And we offer this at the time of diagnosis and throughout, because we are mindful that as you go through this journey, your needs will change. And it’s really important for us to be able to identify those needs and help resolve them for you. And that could be from anything from like it’s up there, financial support right through to a physical ailment, anything at all.

And if you know me at all, you will know that I really love a good analogy. So I’ve came up with one for the purposes of today. So, you know whenever you’re going on holiday, you throw the bags in the car, you get to the airport, you’ve dropped them off and you’re going through security. You’ve two hours to kill, you might even pop into the Lagan Bar just to kill those two hours.

And then you get on the plane, you have your take-off time and your landing time, and you have air traffic control making sure that all happens and that nobody collides into each other in the air. We’ll consider Patricia and I air traffic control. We do a lot of that background work and helping navigate things so that everything’s as streamlined as possible.

And often I wonder, did somebody come up with this analogy before I did? Because the destination is only one part of a journey. Having a streamlined process on that journey’s really important, so we really try and enable that for you.

So I kind of categorise this into what I call the three R’s, reassure, reassess and refer. So depending on your reason for phoning, you might phone up and I can just be like “look I can reassure you, that’s totally fine”. I might have to reassure you and get you reassessed, or maybe just reassess you and get you referred.

Just depends on the nature of the query, ladies. So for talks sake, I’m going to use the example of a hysterectomy. Not everybody in the room will have had that treatment but it’s the surgical removal of your uterus and it’s just for an example. So usually you’ll phone me and everybody starts the conversation with “Shauna I’m really sorry to bother you.

I know you’re so busy” I promise I’m never too busy to take a phone call, because that’s the most important part of my job. So if for example, you had a hysterectomy and you said “look Shauna, I had my hysterectomy six months ago, I’m having some new symptoms, feel a wee bit heavy down below and some new urinary symptoms”.

The first thing I would do would be congratulate you on phoning me, because it’s really important that you tell me that information. I would also reassure you that can be completely normal after that specific surgery. But then to aid your reassurance and to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, I would get you reassessed.

So that’s where I would pick up the phone be like “look Dr Quinn, you wouldn’t reassess Mary here? She had a hysterectomy six months ago and she’s having these new symptoms” and that’ll never be an issue. We’ll orchestrate that and we’ll make it happen. So if you can see I’ve put up this diagram just to kind of explain the analogy. So if we brought you up and for talks sake you had a slight pelvic organ prolapse.

We would explain that that can be completely normal because if you take away the uterus here, you can see that all of a sudden there’s a wee bit more room for the bladder and it can kind of fall back. So sometimes those things can happen and it can result in that feeling of heaviness. The one thing we would definitely do then would be to refer you to a woman’s health physiotherapist, so that we can help you resolve this issue and get back to feeling a bit more like you.

But the key thing here ladies, is that you phone me or Patricia so that we can go ahead and start that process and get the ball rolling.

I want to leave you with an acronym here today, ladies, and it’s called POST, P-O-S-T. You’re all post-diagnosis. Some of you are even post-treatment. But let’s commit to prioritising ourselves ladies – P. So let’s learn to be selfishly unselfish. I don’t think that I’ve ever met a lady during my time doing this job where they’ve said I put myself first,

I always prioritise myself. We’re very bad at doing that, and that’s for me included. But prioritise yourselves in order to – O – optimise your wellbeing. And this is a health and wellbeing event. So I know that your health and wellbeing is important to you and we want to be able to help provide the toolkit and the steps to enable you to be able to do that.

And then S – survive. Survive the day, survive whatever stage of your diagnosis you’re on so that you can then – T – thrive, thrive during the process of your treatment and beyond and we want to be able to provide the toolkit so that you can do that, and we are your support network. And I want to finish doing just one small thing.

It’s so important that you ladies are here today. So I want you to take a moment to give yourselves and each other a massive round of applause for going through what you’ve went through and for being here today, because you all should be so, so proud of yourselves.

That’s our details if you need anything. That number will get you straight through to Vera and Vera has a hotline to myself or Patricia but we’re here for the rest of the day. Thank you.

Brilliant, thank you so much Shauna. Thank you. And Shauna will be here at the break and at the end so if you do have any questions please do, she won’t mind being accosted at the break.