Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hello and welcome to the Yes to Life show. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes to Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity, working for two decades to promote a more empathic, open-minded, hopeful, respectful, aspirational and overall more loving way of supporting people who are unlucky enough to be diagnosed with cancer. Recently, I was very delighted to find another initiative working in our sphere, looking to bring the same more rounded and holistic care to a particular group of people with cancer, younger adults. The Ella Dawson Foundation was set up by Ella’s mother, Jane, and sister Natasha, who were inspired by Ella and the experience of helping her through immense difficulties at a very early age. Hello, Jane and Natasha.

Natasha Dawson
Hi, hi, good morning.

Jane Dawson
Good morning, Robin. Hi.

Robin Daly
A big welcome to the Yes To Life show.

Jane Dawson
Thank you for having us. It’s great to be here.

Robin Daly
And I was really excited to hear about you and your valuable work with young people. And so I’m extremely pleased to have you on the Yes Life show. So, of course, there’s enormous parallels between your story and my own, although your family’s story is one that’s really very recent, while mine’s more than 20 years ago. It’s the same story though. And yeah, from where I am now, my story has jumped between being a very long time ago and somewhere away back in the past, and then something brings it right into the present. And it’s right there again. It’s a strange thing. But, you know, my daughter, she continues to play an immense role in my life. And I imagine she’s always going to. For you, your loss is incredibly recent, really. I mean, in terms of these things, it’s only just happened. But your daughter is clearly fueling your efforts here. You’re really wanting to make a difference. And that’s why in this particular arena, I wanted to be okay to ask you to start off by introducing us to Ella and telling us the story leading up to today.

Jane Dawson
Yeah, of course. Thanks very much for the opportunity. And our daughters do feel everything we do and inspire everything we do, and we totally empathize with that. And Ella is literally inspires us every single day. Ella had an incredible real love of life from being a child. And she developed into an art issue to find art degree, but really from even being a child. Ella just saw absolute beauty and potential in every single day. That really shaped her whole being. She’s a very kind, very gentle person, and just saw beauty everywhere. I think that reflected in her art. If you ever see any of her art, it’s very colorful, very powerful. It just reflects that real true love of life. And so Ella did do a degree in fine arts at Newcastle University. She had four wonderful years up at Newcastle. She was a second home really. She came to love the place and the people in Newcastle. And she graduated in 2019 with a plan to travel to London to pursue a career in the creative industry. I was not quite sure what she wanted to do, but she actually knew it would be centered around art and creativity. But ahead of that, she was spending several weeks in Columbia, traveling to Columbia with one of her housemates from university, an adventure of a lifetime before she started her career in London. Before she went, she’d been feeling intermittently tired, but nothing that was not explainable by a busy life, a final degree, qualifications and studies. But we asked her to pop to the doctor before she went to Columbia. She went to the doctor and the doctor said, yeah, absolutely nothing. Everything’s fine. It’s a very hot day. Get off and have a great, great holiday. So a couple of weeks into her Columbia trip, still not feeling amazing, but again, party is late nights. A young person’s life traveling around Columbia with a huge backpack. She was at altitude. And again, everything put down to all those conditions out there in Columbia. And then subsided for about a week or two and she was having a great time. And then I think about four weeks, she started to come out in quite severe bruising all over her body, almost like car crash bruising, at which point we said, clearly, you know, you need to get to a doctor, you need to come home. We managed to force her to get to a doctor, much against her will. Every long story short, the doctor there took some bloods, asked for them to become back to her doctor here in the UK. They were sent back immediately. My doctor here in the UK within half an hour got them to the local hospital. And within an hour of that told us that although they were not with Ella, there was no other possibility that this could not be leukemia. At that stage, they weren’t clear which leukemia, but a white blood count was incredibly high. So we were on plane the next morning to Columbia, got to Ella and then got her into hospital. She was in ICU in Columbia for a week, stabilizing her to fly home as a platelets were obviously dangerously low at that stage.

Jane Dawson
And then what followed was two years of pretty constant and unrelenting treatment. We went straight from Heathrow to St. James’s Hospital in Leeds. And she was diagnosed there within a week of pH positive, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, started treatment immediately. She didn’t go into remission after the first phase of treatment, and then had to have salvage treatment. Then went into morphological remission, but there remained still some cells. So she had to then, after Christmas, go have several rounds of immunotherapy with a view to clearing those, with views of having a stem cell transplant. Tasha was fortunately her donor for the transplant and was a 100% match. So we were incredibly hopeful at that time that if the immunotherapy could clear up the last remaining leukemia cells, we could then proceed to stem cell transplant in about the February of the 2020. Then COVID kicked in and now we’re all in isolation. And then within a few days of Ella being ready to be admitted, I found that the leukemia had come back. So the stem cell transplant was postponed. And then Ella was put on another two different immunotherapies, completely different ones. Again, the obviously other one had not worked. And through that first period of COVID, we were back and forward to the hospital. She was in her ready for stem cell transplant. Unfortunately, they didn’t really work. It certainly reduced the cancer, but then it actually came back into a spine and a brain at the same time. So the stem cell was looking increasingly unlikely and not possible. And we were trying then that the sort of last ditch hurt was to get her onto CAR T therapy, somewhere in the UK, at the Christie in Manchester. So both teams at the Christie and at St James’s worked incredibly hard with Ella to try so many different treatments to get her in a position to get to the Christie to actually start CAR T, which we managed to do, managed to get her to CAR T therapy, which went incredibly well. Ella was really ill when she went into Manchester and she had been told that it’s very likely she’d go into a coma. She could possibly die and she certainly probably would be blind, given the condition that she was going into CAR T. But both teams said to Ella, if you’re up for it, we’re up for it. We really want to try. We want to do everything possible. And obviously she was, as were we. And actually CAR T went really, really well. It was fantastic. She was in hospital, isolated on her own for seven weeks. We were not able to see her. It was COVID. Fortunately, she was not too bad. Came home again, very, very hopeful, tiny, tiny little bits of leukemia cells remaining, but in the bone marrow, everything else looked amazing. She felt well. She looked well. And then again, within a couple of weeks of that, the leukemia started to come back. They managed to maintain her stability to get to a stem cell transplant in October of that year, again, using Antash’s cells.

Jane Dawson
That was really horrific. That was really, really horrible. And again, we weren’t allowed to see her because of COVID isolation. She came home from that in just before Christmas, 2020. And then we knew if the cancer came back, that was it. We had a Christmas together. I think we knew deep down that might be our last Christmas together. None of us spoke that, but I think we all knew that. And early in January, 17th of January, you know these dates, you remember them, we had the diagnosis that the cancer had now come back and now there were no more options available. The clinical team at Christie were incredible in finding and getting financial support for some drugs to give a better quality of life for longer. As a parent, you cannot accept those words where there are no options to save your child’s life. It’s not possible to accept those words. And I had an incredible love of life. I’ll talk you through in a second how she coped with her diagnosis and all that treatment. But we reached out in the world. I had spent two years reading every single clinical possible paper I could on the cutel lymphoblastic leukemia, what was happening in the world, what was happening in research. We managed to find the hospital in California who were pursuing a first in human clinical trial of a new form of CAR T that had been very successful in mice. And they were now starting, they had one patient enrolled and they were looking for other patients. So we worked with the hospital in UK, with the hospital in California, and miraculously we managed to get other accepted on the trial. We knew it probably, all the chances of it saving her life were slim, but she wanted to give it a go. We wanted to give it a go and we would do absolutely everything. And we were not allowed into the US because of COVID, so we had to get our local MP involved, to get visas, etc. But everything was set up to start treatment to the end of May 2021. Ella and I were to be out there for three months for the recuperation period. And yeah, we were due to travel on Wednesday morning on Tuesday night. Everything was signed off by both hospitals and we got a Wednesday morning to travel to Heathrow Airport and an email had come through in the middle of the night from the team in California saying they’d had another team meeting and now decided that they weren’t going to invite Ella on the trial. So we knew what that meant. Bags were unpacked. That was quite a tough day. The hope had kind of gone at that point. And Ella sadly died six weeks later, July 11th.

Robin Daly
Such a roller coaster to these things, aren’t they? The ups and downs, they’re just amazing. You can be mega hopeful at one minute, only to have the whole thing crushed by some sort of red tape or something. It’s just incredible. Yeah, well, I feel for you. Natasha, do you want to just add anything from a sister’s perspective of going through that whole journey with your sister?

Natasha Dawson
Yeah, I think with it being COVID as well, it throws a completely another dynamic into it. And going into both CAR T and the stem cell transplant, knowing that you can visit was really hard. I think when we were at St. James’s and we could go and you have the visiting time and we were all together on the ward, it brings a little bit more light and a bit more of a positive element to it. But going through COVID and knowing that Ella was on her own in a ward, only seeing a couple of people a day just for observations and not really a conversation. It’s just hard to think that she was going through that and obviously feeling so unwell at the same time and I’m scared and everything that comes with that. I remember it was her 24th birthday in hospital and we weren’t allowed to go see her, so we went outside the hospital window with a bed sheet that I painted Happy Birthday on and we just held that up outside her bedroom window just to share it in some way we can. But yeah, I mean it was a really difficult time but I guess the whole ethos of the charity is what Ella kind of brought to that and what she taught us in such difficult times of how you can still live well despite everything that is thrown with you. Yeah.

Jane Dawson
think, yeah, that’s exactly right, Tasha, because I think, you know, Ella’s carried through in her absolute love of life, despite some truly horrific treatment that she had to go through, actually never changed. And from diagnosis in Colombia and from that being confirmed when we came back to the UK, Ella’s ethos right from day one is I’m not going to be have a diagnosis, and yes, I have to put with the treatment, but I want to live well and I am going to live well, and she did live well. And she felt the, I mean, obviously described the treatment Ella had, and we are truly and wholly indebted to the NHS at both hospitals, she was treated in for every single thing they did to try and save Ella’s life, the experimental drugs and experimental drugs and experiment, they tried absolutely everything, clinically and medically, the teams were phenomenal. But what Ella found was that wellbeing support tailored to the unique needs of young people was missing, helping build resilience, helping improve that capacity to actually return your own identity and not just become a number and not become a petri dish, but to be your own person and to keep that sense of self, to keep some form of connectedness with other people. And she kind of felt that was missing. And certainly in those early days, it’s certainly many of the leaflets she was given, she kept saying, none of this relates to me, I’m really frustrated. And through that journey, obviously, speaking to lots of other young people on the TYA wards and clinical teams, she formed a blueprint working with other young people as to what supportive wellbeing to complement medical care could look like, might look like for young people. And she shaped that she did a number of blogs, she did a number of podcasts. And she anecdotally, she lived that blueprint every single day of her life, even in the darkest times. And strong emotional health, she’d be passionate in physical health. So every single day to her, she would move. So on the days that might mean when she felt well, she’d go for a walk, she could even maybe run a kilometer or something. Or when she was in stem cell transplant, that meant moving her arms or moving her hands. But she tried to keep some sort of routine with emotional and physical strength and nutritional strength, actually, throughout that whole journey, to give that sense of self, that positivity and that hope that I am still me. That seemed to resonate with many, many, many of the young people that she met along that journey. And Ella never asked us to set up a charity, she never actually talked about dying, never at all. Every day was to live and to have hope and positivity. But when we lost Ella, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do that she’d handed as the bat and the blueprint and said, okay, can you do something with this? So we launched the charity, the Ella Dawson Foundation six months after losing Ella in February 2022.

Robin Daly
Amazing. So she created this blueprint, obviously it’s entirely her own efforts. So she’s obviously, that’s her view of what she needed as a person and what was missing from care. She wasn’t getting that kind of support. She was clearly doing it for herself, worked it out for herself. But interestingly, she was sharing it with others at the same time and finding out that she wasn’t the only one actually feeling that.

Jane Dawson
Well, that’s it. And, you know, using her words, these are the words that she put on a blog and a podcast is, yeah, I want to put something out there for the young people, something that I’m missing. And that kind of is the holy thos behind the juris.

Robin Daly
Yeah, very much so. All right, well, that’s great. So yeah, this gave you the bluebirds as you say for what you’ve decided to do, just head up to charity. And so you’re not focused on any particular type of cancer, but you are focused on a particular group of the people with cancer. This is young people. Absolutely. The exact age of the people who support is.

Jane Dawson
18 to 30.

Robin Daly
18 to 30, yeah.

Natasha Dawson
like Amber families and Kerris as well.

Robin Daly
So, maybe we could just spend a bit of time now talking about exactly what you do because, you know, you’ve got a whole range of stuff there. You say been inspired by Ella’s thinking and her model for herself. So, what do you actually decide to provide for people based on that?

Natasha Dawson
So I think from right from the beginning when we submitted the application to become a charity, we kind of had the four core pillars of support. So feel well, move well, eat well and live well. And we kind of thought that gave that umbrella view of kind of holistic wellbeing support. And within each of those core programs, we kind of wanted to offer three different levels as wellbeing isn’t prescriptive. It means something different for everybody and at each stage of your journey throughout your treatment and in life after cancer, things will resonate with you at different times. So you can’t just kind of tell somebody how to feel better, how to live well. You’ve got to be led by yourself and tap into that at different times. So like level one is kind of all about information, awareness, educating yourself around the things that can help you in those different areas. And then level two, we’ve got kind of more like group support, peer to peer support. And then level three is that high level one-to-one support. So for feel well, we’ve got four psychologists that are all specialised in oncology and young people. We’ve got two counsellors as well that support the families. A movement, we’ve got a yoga instructor and two cancer and exercise rehab instructors. The diet, we’ve got an integrative nutritionist and an oncology dietician. And then the live grant that can empowers people to carry on doing the things that they love. So obviously with the financial pressures of cancer, hobbies and interests often are the first thing that goes. So we’re kind of here to empower people to carry on doing that. And it’s, I love seeing what everybody uses that for because it really highlights everybody’s uniqueness and individuality and just empowers them to, you know, that is you. That is what you enjoy doing. And they can carry that on through their treatment. And then we also fund a wellbeing break as well, just to kind of have that time away from your hospital routines. Like we say, like our household was just consumed by cancer and treatments and medications and those discussions. So just to kind of take yourself out of that environment into nature is really healing and it is very, very powerful. Really important. So yeah, there’s kind of that whole wrap around. And I think obviously there’s so much scientific evidence of how exercise and diet and mental health support can change you on a scientific evidence-based level. But also it brings the control and identity and empowerment. And those things are completely lost as a young person. I think in your twenties anyway, it’s hard to navigate what life looks like for you. And then when that’s been completely taken away by a cancer diagnosis and what you have planned is, you know, it’s not in your kind of foreseeable future. And now your life’s dictated by hospital appointments and how you reacted to a treatment and you have to wait for a result before you can kind of move on or go on holiday or do normal twenties, things that you would do.

Natasha Dawson
It is very isolating and that sense of control and who you are as a person is completely taken away. So I think all these things just bring that element back. And you can, like Ella said, prove not all is lost once you’ve been diagnosed with cancer and you’ve got the power to bring that back in and find some strength and…

Robin Daly
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, quite a lot of the things you described there, they would apply to anyone with cancer because there are particular things about getting cancer when you’re that young, which, you know, which are probably not taken into account nearly enough, which is, I mean, literally being, as you say, kind of outside of your life, having, you think your whole adult life ahead of you, your ideas for the things you’re going to do with it. It’s a time of having plans, having aspirations, so many things that these are major factors in our lives that give us momentum and keep optimism and our future is something we hold very dear to us. And having it ripped away at that time of your life is something, you know, it’s a massive loss. It’s a terrible psychological loss. Absolutely. You see, all those things may be in the bin. I may not be able to do any of them. I haven’t even begun, you know, and it is different to somebody who’s already had massive life experience. You know, they may still be very attached to their life as well, but it is actually different when somebody can look back and say, well, you know, I’ve done the most amazing thing. And so, yeah, I think it is a very different situation. It is marvelous that you’ve actually decided to address it directly in this way and to think about, well, exactly what is this group of people need. I wanted to ask, you know, you laid out quite a lot of things in a menu there. Do you find that people who come along are actually taking something from all of those or just one or is it very variable?

Jane Dawson
That’s a really great question.

Natasha Dawson
Yeah, it’s quite terrible. So we get quite a lot of people reaching out saying, I’m not sure what support’s going to help me. I just know I need support. So we can kind of sign post them and then they might start one that’s most important to them. And then after that, they’ve kind of got a little bit more strength and the momentum and they kind of seen the benefits and then they’ll be more inclined to then go try something else and move on. So often, for example, if someone is completely depilitated by their trauma or PTSD from their treatment, psychology is probably the first thing that they will address. They’ll have the sessions were not that prescriptive of how many that will be. It depends on that person. So for example, let’s say they’ve had 10 sessions of psychology. And by the end of that, there got a lot more about them. They’re in a much more stable place to then open up to the idea of introducing exercise back into their life and seeing how exercise and diet can improve their wellbeing and reach towards their goal. And I think sometimes that goal is just to go back to university or to work. And some people might not be kind of understanding of how exercise could help them get to that goal. It’s not just about necessarily losing weight or building strength, which it does. And it has all these wonderful benefits, but actually we can use some of these wellbeing programs to kind of build you up. And it’s about tailoring that to that young person, to whatever that is. And we just work on a very personal, individualized level of kind of understanding that person’s goal and understanding what’s important to them and how we can use our services to help them on that journey and kind of achieve their goal. And so it’s very individualized. So yeah, we kind of find it that most people do access more than one thing in the end, not all at once.

Robin Daly
Yeah, but they tend to find the different ways in. I just think it’s really interesting because obviously you’ve got your actual real world experience of Ella and her own journey, but of course she’s one person and I imagine you’re on this very steep learning curve here with all these different people coming towards you and finding out well what works you know basically with such a wide range of different people with different needs. You’re kind of in new territory here, finding out for yourself. Yeah.

Jane Dawson
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really good question. I mean, obviously our experience now, Ella died in 2021. So, you know, it’s a couple of years in the past. So what we wanted to do was to make sure everything we do is shaped by young people in terms of what young people absolutely want and need. So getting new people at the heart of the charity. So in January this year, we set up a lived experience panel. So we have eight young people who are really central meet very regularly and talk to us about how the charity should develop, what services we should develop in the future. And that is really, really critical. I think the other thing that we are really, really keen on, and again, a really, really central tenant of the charity is that we want to know that everything we’re doing has real life impact and really changes and helps to change lives. So we, we measure statistically in terms of standardized wellbeing and psychological measures, but we also measure anecdotally with feedback from our young people and, you know, how did it help? What did it do? Well, what do you want? And that is so, so powerful, really, really powerful. So I think one of the things that the hospitals tell us that they really value and that the young people value is the flexibility of the service that it isn’t a one size fits all. It’s very much tailored to, as Tasha said, around what each young person wants and at what stage. So we do support up to two years post completion of active treatment because obviously the challenges of cancer don’t stop when treatment stops. So we do support many young people towards the end of remission and beyond as they try to achieve objectives, their own objectives. But yeah, it’s very, very tailored to each, each young person. And one thing we’re extremely proud of, and again, this comes very much from the young people who support in our own experience. When a young person is brave enough or wants to reach out for support, we want to be there there and then. So we deliver a response to that young person or that referral within 48 hours guaranteed. It’s pretty much always the same day. And in the vast majority of cases that young person can start, which are intervention they’ve chosen within 14 days of that original referral. Not everybody wants to do that, but that’s a real key tenant that we try to deliver to the charity to make sure we’re there when that young person needs support.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s really good. I think what you’re doing there and what you just summed up is you’re addressing two of the things which are the glaring gaps, if you like, in care. One of them is that actually this tailoring to individual needs. Well, it doesn’t happen really, does it? It’s a conveyor belt of treatment. There’s just no capacity to do that. And so, yeah, it happens to the level of medical need, but in no other way does it happen. So, enormously important because that’s where the person exists, as you pointed out with Ella, that’s where the individual thing is the person. So, you’re not really accounting for people if you don’t do that. So, that’s one thing. The other thing is, of course, it’s a waiting game, cancer, isn’t it? We’re always waiting for the next, there’s wait for that, wait for that, wait for the other. Yeah.

Jane Dawson
That’s right. And to have a… And to have a…

Robin Daly
service, which is actually responsive and just is there when you need it, is a marvellous thing. It’s exactly what people need. They don’t need to be left waiting without anybody to talk to. So yeah, great you’re doing all of that. I’m sure it’s hugely appreciated. There’s one aspect that you brought up, Tasha, which you’ve mentioned it, which I’d like to talk about a bit more, which is about the rest of the family. Of course, you know plenty about this, having been there. It’s very much not just one person’s thing getting cancer. It involves the whole family in all sorts of complex ways and in different ways for different families. There’s an enormous amount of extra support of one kind or another is needed by the different people in a family and often they don’t get it. Often it’s not even acknowledged that they’re in need of anything in fact. Often the people, the members of the family themselves don’t tell themselves that they need it. So it’s a terribly complicated situation. I’m very pleased to see that you’ve got it kind of itemized as this is one of the things we do because it at least draws attention to the fact that it needs doing. So do you want to just tell us a bit about what you offer, why you offer it and how.

Natasha Dawson
Yeah, so we’ve got the council and support that’s kind of dedicated for families. So whether that’s a partner, dad, sibling, carer, just kind of that immediate support network for the young person. So that’s a dedicated service where there is always going to be capacity and space for those families and stuff to get that support if they need. And then we’ve also got the yoga for them as well. So if it’s not necessarily directly addressing the counseling-wise, the yoga is a really good way to kind of bring a bit of movement, time for yourself, a bit of breath working there, relaxation strategies, just to kind of calm the nervous system and have a better approach, just the supporting role that you are in at that time the next day. And then obviously the wellbeing breaks are quite central and so important for the whole family.

Jane Dawson
and really popular aren’t they?

Natasha Dawson
they’re really good. So yeah, but it’s an interesting point to make because sometimes even though if you feel like you do need support you don’t necessarily feel like there’s the capacity in that time to give up time for yourself when you’re supporting the person in need and things. So it’s a very, like you said, it’s a very, very complex situation and we’re here just to kind of encourage all family members and the young person with the cancer diagnosis to kind of get support if you feel like you need it because if you feel better about yourself and you can deal with it yourself you can also then be in a better position to support the young person and yeah it’s very complicated but we’re kind of advocates. It’s very complex.

Robin Daly
Yeah. I mean, this thing, somebody can even get a sort of on a logical level that they need to look after themselves in order to be able to look after the person better. But it’s actually, when it comes to it, actually taking time out is very hard. It’s very hard for a lot of people to sort of think that they should be the center of attention when somebody else is in such trouble. But, you know, I’ve seen situations where from my point of view, the person with cancer was doing a lot better than their carer. That’s how it can be. So they literally run themselves ragged trying to do everything for this person, which is coming from a great place, but actually, you know, the result can be bad. So, yeah, very good that you’re doing something about it. We’re also trying, yes, life to focus a bit more on carers. We’ve always spoken about carers and families and the need for attention, but actually, well, what do you do about it? Well, I don’t think we’ve done enough until recently. We’re just beginning to address it more directly. And, you know, we’ve got a first carers group happening in and amongst our groups, which I think should be an enormous resource if we can persuade people to take the time out to join it. That’s the challenge, yeah. Yeah. But they, you know, one carer to another is likely to be an extremely supportive situation. It’s been… It is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jane Dawson
That’s a great initiative. I agree, peer support would be really good.

Natasha Dawson
We also have our Life Notes Journal, so myself and Della use journaling massively throughout those two years. And we kind of didn’t find one that kind of did what we wanted. So we kind of got all load up and then that was my little lockdown project was creating this journal based off what we both kind of felt was relevant. And so there’s a whole host of kind of daily check-ins, gratitude, journal prompts and reflective pieces, and then just free writing space, mindful colouring, goal setting. So it’s kind of offering that whole holistic thing of reflection, but also looking forward free writing space just to kind of let your thoughts pour out. And that’s been really popular, especially against with the families because you’re not asking for much time there. It can be done privately. It can be done when the young person’s having treatment or when you’re at home alone at night kind of thing. So that’s a really nice resource that’s been really well received by young people and families. And the psychologists have kind of looked through and approved all the goodness in there. And yeah, it’s for anybody. It’s not related to cancer directly. And the general public can purchase it and that’s a bit of a fundraiser for us as well. So it’s yeah, a nice little.

Robin Daly
Sounds great. So that’s your own thing basically developed from your own experience.

Natasha Dawson
Yeah, exactly.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s great. Brilliant. Okay, so it’s interesting to me what you’ve decided to do is very much based on Ella’s experience and you’ve all your efforts are going into this area which you would call well-being basically and roundly and it includes sort of lifestyle medicine, complementary medicine and psychological and emotional help and within that you’re kind of you’re acknowledging the importance of this to people actually in this situation of being faced with a major, major roadblock in their life of cancer especially at that age and that actually without that it’s a bit of a desert basically. These are the things that actually get people through that hopefully in a way which is much more human and you mentioned the science and this is one of the great things that’s happened during the time that I’ve been doing this is like well there wasn’t that much science 20 years ago frankly there was a bit but honestly there’s so much more now to say well this isn’t just sort of kind of nice to have or you know what I mean it was just seen as fluff basically but now we know that it’s a lot more than that that some things have a direct effect you know exercise can have a direct effect on markers for cancer all sorts of markers for health and resilience and wellness you know this stuff has been measured now and it’s so great to have the science to underpin it it’s kind of like the science to underpin common sense so you know common sense says well it’s good to get out and you know experience a bit of nature and everything but actually now because it’s good because it does this and that’s hugely important I think for the whole sector that’s trying to bring forward this model of care

Jane Dawson
Yeah, so just exactly on that point of evidence, last year we were absolutely so proud to fully fund the first dedicated complementary therapist, I think in the UK, dedicated to TYA students, patients, at the Christie in Manchester. And even probably in the time that we’ve been in this world, you’re absolutely right. Maybe things like that were seen as a little bit peripheral and not central. And the Christie have taken such a fantastic stance and realising, based on the evidence, how critical and vital it is to supporting young people with that kind of postage, and they really want to do, but obviously struggled with the funding to approach those. And we funded that role, and the impact of the role at the Christie is so powerful. As our charity develops, we’d like to be able to roll that out to other centres throughout the UK in the future. Not in a position to do that at this point in time, but certainly that’s something that we’d really like to do.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s great. And yeah, I think all of that wouldn’t have happened without the science. Absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. It’s made that possible.

Natasha Dawson
Yeah. And it’s nice to see the complementary therapist is out on the walls. She goes with patients and young people to clinic appointments, to treatments, to scans, and he’s really directly face-to-face with. So everybody’s kind of looking at how this role is having such an impact on someone. And it’s just presenting with, you know, anxiety or panic around a certain treatment or scan and then they kind of see that person managing that. And it’s like, oh my gosh, wow, like this is having such a good role. And it’s, you know, that’s kind of been spread in the hospital environment, which is amazing.

Jane Dawson
And I think the real innovation then at the Christie’s touching to the point that we were just discussing about parents and carers and parents carers not giving themselves that time to be supported, but certainly while they’re young people in for treatment, they’re then working with a complimentary therapist because their young person is having a scan or having blood tests and they will accept that support. So it’s also having a fantastic effect and support to parents and carers and families in that hospital setting. So I think it’s a phenomenal innovation at the Christie.

Robin Daly
I totally agree. You must be very proud of that. And when this stuff is actually under people’s noses, they see it working in the hospital. That’s when things change. Otherwise, it’s just something that people do somewhere else, and it’s all a bit woo woo. But yeah, it does actually work and it helps people to get through what is, let’s face it, one of the most horrendous challenges on so many levels. So look, we’re out of time already. So much to talk about. Yeah, brilliant. I’m just really pleased to have you both on the show. I’m enormously impressed and inspired by what you’ve achieved already. And I want to look for every opportunity that we can collaborate between Yes4Life and your foundation. It would be an honor to do that. And yeah, I feel like we’re very much on the same wavelength. And we’re both wanting to see cancer care become truly holistic, empathic kind of care. And that’s what we’re working to achieve to round out what is rather technical at the moment, basically does the job, but misses the people out. So thanks very much indeed for coming on the show. Thank you very much.

Jane Dawson
Robin. We are absolutely on the same page and it would be an honour to work together as well. We’ve both done exactly the same mission. Thanks very much.

Robin Daly
It’s astonishing what Jane and Tasha have been able to achieve in just a very few years and I look forward to even greater achievements to come. Do take a look at the Foundation’s website, that’s elladawsonfoundation.org.uk, where you can read more about all their services and the people delivering them. Thanks very much for listening today. Look out at the same time next week when I’ll be back again with another yes to life show. Goodbye.