Dr Rosy Daniel has been involved in coaching for cancer for over 20 years and explains the significant benefits it can offer at every stage.
Dr Rosy Daniel has been involved in coaching for cancer for more than twenty years. During that time, the concept has gained ground to the point where it is now positioned with all the potential to become a standard approach to supporting those with cancer.
Anyone who has been through diagnosis and treatment will attest to the enormous challenges of entering the highly unfamiliar territory of cancer care and navigating some extremely difficult choices and changes, and coaching has demonstrated enormous benefits in providing support and signposting at every stage.
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Robin Daly Hello and welcome to the Yes To Life show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, host for the show and founder of Yes To Life, the UK’s integrative cancer care charity, helping people with cancer to help themselves for the last 20 years.
Robin Daly My guest today is someone who was already well established in the field 20 years ago when I set up Yes To Life, playing a leading role in developing UK cancer care. The particular field that Dr Rosie Daniel has become strongly identified with over the years is mind-body medicine or psychoneuroimmunology to give it its technical name.
Robin Daly And in order to deliver the best in this field, she set up a training scheme for mentors to coach those with cancer and provide support at every stage of treatment and after. Since that time, health coaching has become far more established and is set to potentially play an important role in health care generally and in cancer specifically going forward.
Robin Daly Hi Rosie, so great to have you back on the show again.
Dr Rosy Daniel Oh, thank you, Robin. It’s so lovely to be here.
Robin Daly So, today we’re going to talk about a topic that’s occupied your thinking for a great deal of your life, and that’s health coaching, or to be more specific in our context, cancer coaching. Of course, you’re a pioneer in realising this is an important and much-needed role, and in actually setting out probably one of, if not the, first scheme in the UK to train coaches specifically in this way.
Robin Daly So, things have come a long way since then, so we’ve got plenty to talk about. Rosie, I wonder if you’d give our listeners a brief introduction to yourself and your life’s work, and then speak a little bit about how the whole coaching thing came about in the first place.
Dr Rosy Daniel Fantastic. Thank you, Robin, so much. Well, I’m a holistic doctor, first and foremost. I’ve trained as a GP, but very swiftly after qualifying, found the amazing Bristol Cancer Help Center charity where Penny Braun and Pat Pilkington were pioneering the holistic model to cancer.
Dr Rosy Daniel So that was right back in 1985. And I worked there as a doctor and then medical director and ultimately chief executive for 15 years. And at that time, it was coming close to the millennium. And I just was thinking, should we be looking at bringing this all back up the river and seeing can we work to prevent cancer as well as treating and helping people who are just very, very poorly and very challenged.
Dr Rosy Daniel And at the same time, one of the people who came, a guy called Mike Opie said, you’re all very good at describing what you do, but you’re not asking us as the clients. So he persuaded me to do a focus group study with 54 people with cancer in their families to describe their emotional cancer journey.
Robin Daly What a great thing to do, right? Yeah.
Dr Rosy Daniel So we did that in four cities around Britain and got a huge amount of data about the journey people had gone on and whether or not they had found access to the self-help resources that were emerging countrywide because at that time there were a lot of cancer help support groups and there were emerging complementary therapies and your good selves emerging with yes to life you know there were things emerging but what we found was that it was really random whether people found their way to these empowering resources and of the major findings of that piece of research people were saying number one we want our attempts to save our lives seen as rational not crazy we want health care professionals trained in the full range of complementary and alternative therapies so that we can make informed choices we want health care professionals who have advanced communication skills very close to your heart yes and we want link workers who can connect us who can help us understand what we’re going through help us understand our needs and our state and then get us to the right resources for us and so whether you think of this as a link worker or a patient navigator what I ended up with was kind of despite myself inventing a model for health coaching and mentorship which I called health creation yes and I wrote a big pack called the cancer lifeline kit you’ll remember I do rather big and started training people as health coaches right back in 2003 so we’ve we like you have have gone past our 20-year point but now the whole health coaching profession is is burgeoning particularly because we now have the United Kingdom and International Health Coaching Association led by the amazing Isabella Naturans yes and her team Faye Sarah they are absolutely on fire with getting health coaching everywhere
Dr Rosy Daniel And it’s they who have encouraged me now to do a specialist module called Health Coaching for People with Cancer aimed at helping people who’ve already trained as coaches to upskill, but also other cancer professionals, because I’ve now got 40 years experience of helping people through that journey from the moment of the shock and impact of diagnosis through understanding treatments, through getting treatments,
Dr Rosy Daniel and on into the all important healing journey and prevention journey, secondary prevention. You know, people think prevention is only if you haven’t had an illness, but that’s primary prevention. But secondary prevention is, okay, you know, I’ve got diabetes, or I’ve got heart disease, or I’ve got cancer.
Dr Rosy Daniel What can I do to undo it, reverse it? So that’s where it all came from.
Robin Daly Yeah, extraordinarily important topics. I mean, yes, it’s needed far more now than it ever was when you invented it, of course, because things got much worse in terms of chronic disease and the need for specialist support in that way.
Robin Daly Amazing. Yeah, so there’s going to be people listening today who’ve just been diagnosed with cancer and are struggling to find their way forward in this unfamiliar territory. There’s going to be others who have cancer but actually never heard of the idea of a cancer coach.
Robin Daly So do you want to do a quick sales pitch? One of the main reasons someone might consider getting themselves a coach.
Dr Rosy Daniel Okay. Well, the very first thing I would say to anybody listening is that cancer is a two-way process. It can go forward, but it can stop, it can go into remission, and it can heal. And I have people in my practice and working with mentors who are now 5, 10, 15, even 20 years past their prognosis.
Dr Rosy Daniel So there is everything to play for in terms of getting yourself in the driving seat, learning about all the things that you can do to raise your body’s ability to self-heal. But in terms of what we do as coaches, what we’re trying to do is help motivate, empower, support, guide people, because people say to me, who are newly diagnosed, it’s like I’m having to get a PhD in this subject in six weeks.
Dr Rosy Daniel There is so much information coming at me, friends, internet, Dr. Google, et cetera, quite frankly overwhelming. And so the mentor’s role is really to help people work out what’s right for them. What do they believe?
Dr Rosy Daniel What are their care values? And to help them find a voice if they are feeling uncomfortable with standard treatments, nice guidelines, et cetera. To help them find out what’s right for them, because surprise, surprise, when we do the things that feel right to us, we do better emotionally, spiritually, and physically.
Dr Rosy Daniel So the mental will guide a person through two phases, what I call health revival, where we’re working on getting the body, the mind, the spirit, and the environment optimal for healing. And then the second phase is what we call life revival.
Dr Rosy Daniel So how does my life need to change to actually support me to be the happiest and healthiest I can be? Because you know that I’m bottom line, I’m a mind body doctor. I really, really find that people being on song and alive and happy and excited is the best medicine.
Dr Rosy Daniel Sounds too simple, but honestly, when people are empowered to cross tracks and maybe move away from a lifestyle or a work style that’s boring them, depressing them, stressing them, into doing something that gives them excitement and energy, all the body tissues start working better.
Dr Rosy Daniel So there’s a lot more to it. The mentors coach people through healthy nutrition, to finding the right kinds of exercise, improving relationships, reducing stress, finding meaning and purpose, raising vitality.
Dr Rosy Daniel It’s another really big thing because a lot of us have a personality where we’re over giving other focused, losing all of our precious life energy. So much so that I’ve started to call health creation life energy management.
Dr Rosy Daniel Okay. Yeah. So for us all to look at where am I hemorrhaging my precious life energy? How do I build it and create it? And learning to say the magic word, no, I’m sure people will be nodding, listening to this because almost everybody I see are people who are over givers and looking after everybody else except themselves.
Robin Daly Yeah, there’s a lot of conditioning in that way. Yes, as you say, you’re a mind body doctor, you have been all along. And it’s very heartening that, you know, during the period of years to life, we’ve gone from point where people like you were passionate about this and said it was important.
Robin Daly But you only had your clinical experience to back that up. Whereas now, of course, we’ve got studies, we’ve got, you know, the biology of what actually happens has been tested, the biochemical processes are apparent.
Robin Daly And you can actually see that happening scientifically, which is extraordinary, isn’t it, to have the backing to say, yep, we were right.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, exactly so, Robin. It is thrilling to see the evidence emerging. And this is one of the course I’m starting in January. It’s a 20-hour course, so it’s not a great big course, but it’s hour-packed because I’m going to be teaching over four Saturday mornings, and then with tutorials in between for people to practice their skills.
Dr Rosy Daniel And one of those Saturday mornings is exactly about that, the evolution of the evidence for self-help, for nutrition, for the mind-body connection, psycho, neuro, epigenetics, and all of these fascinating things that have shown us how our immune system and even our gene integrity can be affected by meditation, by loving kindness, by gratitude, by having loving connection in support groups.
Dr Rosy Daniel So, you know, back in the Bristol days in the 90s, some of my therapists would say, Juneau, meditation heals your genes. And I was saying, yeah, right.
Robin Daly A step too far. Okay.
Dr Rosy Daniel Even even even for me that was a little bit out there but they were right. And this is the work of Dr. Dean Ornish and Elizabeth Blackburn and Bruce Lipton and many, many other amazing scientists. When Penny and Pat started the Cancer Help Center, it was all based on female intuition. And guess what? It turned out to be right.
Robin Daly Well, it’s great because, I mean, that message, if you like, is a message that speaks directly to the part of healthcare that is totally absent from our public healthcare system. There’s no recognition of the fact that it exists, that science, or that it has any importance at all or any relationship to whether people do well or badly when they’ve got a chronic disease like cancer.
Robin Daly And, you know, they want to know why the results are so bad. Well, that’s a good place to start, as far as I’m concerned. And if they were able to build in some genuine care that took into consideration all of those factors, how important it is to support people emotionally, spiritually, mentally, in every way, then, you know, we see a lot of different healthcare and a lot of happier cancer patients with nothing else.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, the first person who tuned us into this world was Dr. Stephen Greer, a social oncologist who showed that just two years into a breast cancer diagnosis, women who started day one with fighting spirit, 80% were alive, and women who day one went into helplessness and only 20% were alive.
Dr Rosy Daniel So there was a 60% difference, survival difference, depending on coping style. And Professor Leslie Walker has shown how adversely depression affects survival and conversely groups where the people have been supported to tackle depression and isolation and to move into positive coping styles, there’s been huge advances with survival, not just happiness and positive mind, but actual survival.
Dr Rosy Daniel So there is everything to play for. These interventions are cheap by comparison with medicine. Professor Karol Sikora, a great great supporter of holistic medicine, there was one study on diet and exercise, the San Diego study that showed that women who both started to eat a healthy vegetable-based diet and exercise improved their survival rate by something like 49%.
Dr Rosy Daniel Karol went on record to say, there is no treatment for breast cancer, which has such a good outcome. And that’s free. Obviously we have to buy our food and what have you, but it doesn’t cost the NHS a penny.
Robin Daly That’s absolutely right. Yeah, well, it’s stunning stuff and it is so heartening that we don’t have to skulk around this stuff anymore on the back. We can actually shout about it because it’s science and the people who are trying to deny it simply won’t look at the science.
Robin Daly Okay, that’s great. A very important step along the way, I think, in bringing this science to the fore and bringing the importance of other factors into the mix has been Kelly Turner’s research and radical remission book.
Robin Daly I think that’s a massive contribution to making people wake up to the fact that these simple choices that people are making that they are putting down their success to, they’re extremely important and they’re not medical choices.
Robin Daly Only a couple of them are even practical, complementary and alternative medicine choices. Most of them are to do with their mindset, to do with their relationship, their life, that kind of thing. It’s rather that sort of esoteric territory by healthcare standards, but it’s true.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, all the work that’s been done on radical remission and unusual survival constellates around belief. You know, belief in our own ability to heal, belief in our therapists. Sometimes some people, it’s belief in a higher power or divine healing.
Dr Rosy Daniel It’s people who use belief-based therapies, hypnotherapy, visualization, imaging to see in their mind’s eye an outcome which is positive. And so it’s about becoming the architect of your future and seeing yourself.
Dr Rosy Daniel There are visualizations on my Dr. Rosie Daniel website which are free of charge and accessible to everybody and one of them is called repairing your timeline because when you have a diagnosis, people say their sense of future collapses.
Dr Rosy Daniel So this is a visualization leading people through gently, okay, there’s been a car crash, but you’re okay, you’re alive. Getting out the car, shaking off that mantle of illness and then seeing down your timeline in one year, two years, five years, 10 years, 15 years, reopening up your sense of future.
Dr Rosy Daniel So that’s powerful and there are other visualization techniques too, the classic Simonton techniques of seeing everything all illness gone. There’s another lovely one I’ve put in there that originated from Herbert Benson about what he called remembered wellness.
Dr Rosy Daniel So taking yourself to remembering the fittest, strongest in your trousers you ever felt and just powering yourself up or seeing yourself as a strong totem or some symbol of power for yourself. The mind is so powerful.
Robin Daly Interesting. Okay, so look, back for coaching, maybe you could just sort of highlight some key points along the spectrum of experiences that people can’t have to deal with and the way that a coach can interact with them and help them through that.
Dr Rosy Daniel So from the research we did way back along in the 90s called Meeting the Needs of People with Cancer for Support and Self-Management, we mapped this into 12 absolutely essential needs. And they run through obviously facing getting tests, receiving diagnoses, all the feelings of isolation and fear, fears of doctors and hospitals, but then a crunchy one making an informed treatment decision.
Dr Rosy Daniel So holding people long enough so that they know what they really want and have really looked at both sides of the story. And then of course going through the treatment, facing losses that the treatment may bring.
Dr Rosy Daniel And another point is coping with the end of treatment. A lot of people say they feel quite well supported while they have all these appointments and nurses and other people helping them, but then it can finish.
Dr Rosy Daniel And then the reality of what’s going on can come flooding in. There’s also a role a coach can do in terms of helping people prepare for treatment because there’s talk now of prehabilitation, this idea that you prepare for chemo or surgery or radio as if you were going to climb Kilimanjaro.
Dr Rosy Daniel And they’re showing now that people who are fit and doing high intensity exercise, not just tolerate chemo better, but have better outcomes because they’re fit and they’re not struggling so much with the impact of the chemo.
Dr Rosy Daniel And then of course we go on to the question of helping people. The really big point of coaching is the transformational potential in the crisis. And Penny Ron was the one who first said that the Chinese symbol for crisis had within it both danger and opportunity.
Dr Rosy Daniel So the clever Chinese have known always that a crisis like this can crack us open. It can put us into what’s called liminal space from which change is possible. For most of us, change is really hard because it’s stuck in our uncomfortable comfort zone.
Dr Rosy Daniel But when we have a big shock like this, actually change becomes possible. And when you get the right loving kind, compassionate support to see, well, what might have been the reasons why I got ill? What could the message of this illness be?
Dr Rosy Daniel And most important of all, where is life for me now? Where is life coming from? What are the things that make, if I wake up in the morning, it’s a woohoo, I’m doing my singing today or my flying or my whatever it might be that really gets the heart going a little faster.
Dr Rosy Daniel And I’ve seen over the years, so many people who’ve been coached and encouraged to make that leap into a new lifestyle and then just continue to get better and better and better and go into long-term remission.
Dr Rosy Daniel So that’s for me, the heart of the matter. Of course, as coaches, we want to help people through all the tough things, to know their own mind and to get into their power, but mainly we want to get them into their life and to come alive.
Robin Daly Very important. Fantastic. Yeah. And really is making the best of this very difficult circumstance to actually see the opportunities that are in it. And yeah, we need some help to do that often because it looks pretty bleak.
Robin Daly So fantastic role for a coach. I also was, when you spoke about the end of treatment from that point there, this is something that’s talked about for a long time, got recognized that this was actually a really bad point, what, 10 years ago at least.
Robin Daly And has anything been done about it? Well, I don’t think so really, but a coach is in a great position to actually be able to anticipate this with somebody and kind of plan for it, if you like, expect it and thereby it will be different inherently.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, in my vision, Robin, ideally people would have a mental from the day they’re diagnosed or the day they started having symptoms because having somebody alongside you on that journey as you go through and find out about these things, who knows how to help deal with shock and how to give space for shock and grief.
Dr Rosy Daniel And I mean, one of my bugbears is people not having treatments when they are in shock because it’s been proven that we do less well. We have more complications. Guess what? The body’s full of adrenaline and it doesn’t self-heal so well.
Dr Rosy Daniel But if we had a mentor who took people through that pre-treatment phase, the treatment phase and then on into the prevention phase and was with somebody, say for a year, that would be absolutely superb.
Dr Rosy Daniel And at the moment, I’m hopeful because UKI HCA is putting so much focus on the value of health coaching and mentorship, I’m hopeful that this will come about and that this integration will happen. But the more of us there are, the more people who train as health creation mentors and cancer coaches, the more of a voice we get and a lobby we can become.
Robin Daly And just on what cancer coaches are offering to people, there’s one other thing that struck me. You were talking about, well, that experience you have in the first few weeks of being buried in information.
Robin Daly And one of the things that’s so hard, I’ve realized from my own experience and from having shared the experience of so many other people, is that it’s not necessarily the quality of what’s there in terms of information, but it’s also the relevance that you can’t sort out.
Robin Daly Everything seems to be equally important at the time. But that’s not the case, of course. If we actually knew ourselves, we’d know, well, look, the really important thing right now is this here. We need to look into this.
Robin Daly And then we can put the other stuff on hold and look at it when it’s time comes. But to be able to do that yourself takes an enormous amount of inquiry. And to have somebody there to help guide you gently towards the things that really matter and to tell you why they really matter now, I can imagine that’s fantastic.
Dr Rosy Daniel Yeah. Well, you’re such a well-made point, Robin, and this is why when I work with people with my integrated medicine doctor hat on, I talk about phases and levels. So when we’re in that pre-treatment phase, the focus is on shock and grief and sifting through the choices being given and knowing our own healthcare values.
Dr Rosy Daniel When we get into treatment, we need to be focusing absolutely on being adequately nourished and exercised and oxygenated, but also having complementary first aid to offset the side effects of treatment.
Dr Rosy Daniel And so there’s an awful people get to that end of treatment. For me, that’s when the work begins because that’s when we’re looking at the new life, the new me, and how am I going to prevent this for the long term.
Dr Rosy Daniel And of course, there are a few people I meet who don’t want anything to do with conventional medicine and who start off looking at alternatives from the get-go. But usually, most of the people I see go for a best of both worlds approach, integrating some parts of orthodoxy with self help, complementary therapies, spiritual guidance, and so forth.
Dr Rosy Daniel But with my integrated medicine doctor hat on, and there are lots of us, I’m one of a growing number of doctors who will help people to work out the nitty gritty. Am I safe not to have orthodox medicine?
Dr Rosy Daniel Have I got time to try a fully holistic approach before automatically saying yes to orthodox medicine? So I think that is more the scope of practice of an integrative medicine doctor than a coach. The coach is really helping you to be the best version of you you can be, but you do need some medical knowledge to help guide people as to whether it’s safe to take care of people.
Robin Daly But I mean, what you’ve talked about is it just shows how many decisions there are on how many levels they’re on as well, you know, the whole life of the decisions to practical choices. And yeah, it’s quite a thing to negotiate.
Dr Rosy Daniel And let’s remember families and close ones. One of the poaching modules that I also offer is for people who are in that family or close one position who tend to forget all about themselves. So all of the eyes are on the person that’s ill, everything is about them, and people can fail to realize that this may be a marathon, not a sprint, and they can get really exhausted and deplete and not be properly tuning into their own needs.
Dr Rosy Daniel So that is a whole separate role for a cancer coach, which is to see if we can engage people who are carers, not only in learning how to be a fantastically good carer, but also having a self-help strategy so that we can be nourishing ourselves for if this is a long-term journey and thinking about ourselves, keeping ourselves in the picture.
Dr Rosy Daniel And the other big one is the spiritual side of it, because of course the minute people get this diagnosis, it throws up all the big existential questions. Who am I? What is life? What is dying? What happens when we die?
Dr Rosy Daniel Do I believe in life after death? And so on. But practically, do I need to make preparations and think about what happens if I am not here? And so this is another beautiful part of the work that can happen.
Dr Rosy Daniel If people are brave enough to look at these big questions, because there can be so much fear caught up in that bundle, that people can be using all their energy to push that away rather than using that energy to heal.
Robin Daly Right. Yeah. What a relief to have maybe dealt with a lot of that stuff and feel comfortable with it. Yeah, absolutely right. Great. Well, there’s so many potential areas there in which somebody can step in and support somebody and be helpful to them.
Robin Daly These are all battles that people are fighting on their own. It’s going round and round their heads and horrendous at the same time actually may be feeling terrible. So yeah, support is a great thing.
Robin Daly So yeah, you’re just mentioning about the trajectory of coaching itself. So coaching has come a long way since you were setting up what however many years ago it was 20 years ago plus. But it’s, funnily enough, my experience is that one of the best things for coaching and for a number of other things has been the COVID pandemic.
Robin Daly There’s actually changed attitudes towards health promotion, towards prevention, towards self-care. All these things, wellbeing was a wacky word that a few people in the West Country did. But by the end of the pandemic, people knew that people whose wellbeing was not that good, they just died in the face of a bug like COVID and other people just had flu.
Robin Daly And this was quite a wake up call, I think, for people. And add that to the fact that people didn’t have the health care they were used to. They were stuck in their flat or whatever it was. And they had to look outside the box a little bit and talk to other people about what they were doing to promote their own health and wellbeing.
Robin Daly And so the whole status in my mind, the health and wellbeing took a big step during those two or three years. And the opportunities have come out of that crisis, funnily enough. And here we are. And I think, yeah, it is poised for much greater things. I’d love to hear how you see it.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, I will never forget ringing up my GPs surgery during COVID and hearing that voicemail saying, you know, this is how you get a test and this is how you, you know, deal with symptoms. And if you feel ill, do not come to the doctors.
Dr Rosy Daniel It’s like, all right, thanks. So, you know, yes, it did throw us all back on our resources. Um, and it also taught us so many valuable lessons, you know, working on Zoom, working from home, not having to drive around the country or.
Dr Rosy Daniel It wouldn’t have happened, would it, without the crisis? I don’t think so. It was a. Ten years longer, I think. I think it was a great thing, but I think politically at the moment, um, because when I started the NHS cost about 108 billion and I think on the last count, health and social care was up to 265 billion per annum.
Dr Rosy Daniel so I think the healthcare elements of that were up at about 180. And so in, in that short period of time, healthcare expenditure has nearly doubled and there’s a lot of factors driving that, but the biggest is the rise in so called lifestyle illnesses.
Dr Rosy Daniel So we’re talking cancer, heart, obesity, diabetes, um, all the arthritodes, allergies, inflammatory conditions, and guess what? They all have the same cause. It just depends on your physiology, which one of those you get, but this is the absolutely, you know, game changing thing about having a health coach, because if you can address how you eat, how you sleep, exercise, the amount of love in your life, meaning purpose, connection, belonging, you know, these are in health creation, we go a bit further than lifestyle medicine. You know, they, they are addressing four or five of those parameters. Um, we go a bit deeper into, as I say, meaning and purpose, spiritual connection, the impact of your environment, your physical space, your time in nature.
Dr Rosy Daniel But, the big one Dean Ornish, uh, talks about the great cardiologist who proved you can reverse coronary artery disease with lifestyle interventions. He proved categorically that it’s the loving connection and belonging that is the most important variable.
Dr Rosy Daniel So yes, let’s all eat, sleep, and do more exercise, but let’s get ourselves out of isolation.
Robin Daly Right. Yeah, very much so. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, basically, at the moment. And, you know, the power of groups to facilitate healing in a way that any amount of other interventions can’t is now becoming apparent.
Robin Daly And it’s quite obvious why, when you take that thing that been already shared there, well, that’s what a group provides. It actually puts those things back in place again and makes you belong somewhere.
Robin Daly So, unsurprising in a way that they’re so powerful. But it is, nonetheless, I find it surprising that they’re extraordinary things, you know, and they really do facilitate the most amazing things. It’s kind of a shortcut, almost.
Dr Rosy Daniel it’s quite amazing going right back to the Bristol days when I was there in the 80s and 90s. We had every week, we had a residential week where we had a group of a dozen people together on a journey just five days.
Dr Rosy Daniel And sort of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday was sort of all the grief and the pain and the hurt and the sadness coming out, but the group as a whole held each other and created a well of loving, compassionate attention and focus, which allowed the unspeakable to be spoken.
Dr Rosy Daniel And you know, allowed people to, in a way that it would have been hard for another person alone to hear, all people to feel brave enough to voice. But then we used to call it Wobbly Wednesday. By Wednesday, there was a bit of a wobble going on.
Dr Rosy Daniel But by Thursday, you know, we were up into thrilling Thursday and Fabulous Friday. And by the time people left, they were saying, this has been the best week of my life. And it was all about, I mean, we had brilliant therapists and team, but it was all about that group process.
Dr Rosy Daniel So now in health creation, we’re training the coaches to work with groups for that reason, and also because it makes it cheaper and more accessible.
Robin Daly Yeah, it’s completely common sense medicine, you know, yeah. So look, we’ve only got a couple of minutes left, and I’m just thinking that some people listening may not be people who are interested in getting a coach because they’ve got cancer, but they might be interested in being a coach. So tell me a bit about that.
Dr Rosy Daniel So every year we run the Health Creation, Coaching and Mentorship Diploma. It starts in October every year. But this short course I’m running from January to March is a specialist module for people who know they want to coach people with cancer.
Dr Rosy Daniel And so if people want to get involved on either account, the website is healthcreation.co.uk and to reach me and my team support at healthcreation.co.uk.
Dr Rosy Daniel The one after Christmas is four Saturday mornings and four practice sessions is open to people who are already coaches or people who already work with people with cancer who have some grounding in this.
Dr Rosy Daniel So it’s aimed at people who want to look after, it’s not so much this course aimed at people with cancer so much as people who want to help people with cancer. With my other hat on, my Dr. Rosie Daniel hat on, see people with cancer and I’m available through my clinic to help people one-to-one who are trying to sort through the medical side of this whole process, but we’re extremely keen to meet people who want to become coaches and dear Isabella at UKIHCA has a her vision is that coaching can be the beating heart of healthcare, that it can weaken the team, the triage. So rather than going straight into your GP, you’d see a coach to work out at what level you are ailing. Is it social? Is it emotional? Is it physical? Is it something about which you can do something yourself?
Dr Rosy Daniel So it could be a way of providing the integration that we all long for in our healthcare practitioners to have coaches right there in the heart.
Robin Daly I think, well, yes, I’ve heard Isabella speak about her vision, and I like it. But because you’re right, they could provide a kind of signposting portal that sends people to the resources they need, which is not going to happen if it’s coming from just this one side that knows nothing much about it, you know, trying to get that to happen, it’s a long shot.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, right back in my early GP training, it was spelled out that in terms of what people take to the GP, 50% of it is social, 25% psychological, and of the 25 physical, half of that is psychosomatic, though stress-induced.
Dr Rosy Daniel So we get trained as doctors for about 12.5% of what we actually deal with.
Robin Daly No wonder they’re overwhelmed, ain’t they? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Dr Rosy Daniel there’s such a mismatch between the need and the provision. And obviously this is what I believe, as you say, I’ve dedicated my life to it, that now I believe that if we had health coaches there at that first point of contact, people could get much more of the help they really, really need.
Robin Daly Okay, sounds good to me. We’re going to have to end it there, out of time. Thanks so much. It’s always interesting to hear your perspective on supporting people with cancer, Rosie, because of course you’ve been doing it so long, you’ve got such a wealth experience and you’ve given so much thought to the needs of people with cancer and how best we can meet them. So thank you very much indeed.
Dr Rosy Daniel Well, right back at you, Robin. I so admire what you’re doing and the fact that you’re still there after all this time, providing grants and help and support and your beautiful communication policy for healthcare professionals is wonderful work that you do.
Robin Daly Do check out those resources that Dr. Daniel provided and if you’re someone with cancer then do consider whether a coach could provide you with the support and direction that you need.
Robin Daly Yestolife has launched its Christmas appeal with a dedicated appeal website and a fabulous Christmas download for you should you contribute. Despite being a time of celebration and joy it’s a challenging time of the year for many.
Robin Daly So there are also resources on the website for them. By supporting our appeal you’ll be helping us in our work to support and educate people across the UK in the many ways that they can improve their situations.
Robin Daly So please do be generous. You can access the appeal website either directly at stockingsofhope.org or from the yestolife website and there’s a link from the rotating banner that’s right at the top of the home page.
Robin Daly Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back again next week to introduce another expert guest in the next yestolife show. Goodbye.
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