COPES June NEWS 2024
OUR JUNE SUPPORT GROUP/COFFEE MORNING
This will be held in the Southend Hospital Women’s Clinic
It’s on Saturday June 1st between 10am and 1pm.
Our support groups are run on a peer to peer basis, by women who have been diagnosed with gynae cancers. We have support from the CNS team and sometimes have a complementary therapist, when we are in the Women’s Clinic. We are a friendly, informal group and often have a great laugh. We have discussions on matters relating to life in general from the perspective of women who understand a gynae cancer diagnosis, treatment, moving on, survivorship and all that goes with life after our diagnoses. In our last month’s meeting we had a very useful and frank discussion about what it meant to us to have an early surgical menopause. We shared some very useful tips about coping with the side effects and how we have found help from other hospital departments or from various complementary approaches. We are hoping that one of the CNS team will be able to develop this side of the support for gynae cancer patients at some time in the future, with the support of COPES. We will keep you updated.
DINNER DANCE UP-DATE
Our hugely enjoyable Dinner Dance made exactly £1,000 due to an extremely kind donation by Denise F, one of our early COPES members, to make the sum up to £1,000. Thank you, Denise, for always being such a keen COPES supporter.
GOOD LUCK, and a big thank you to LIZ!
We were so pleased to hear that Liz has gained a promotion following her master’s degree study. She will be Programme Lead – Regional Genomic Clinical Practitioner Service – East of England Cancer Alliance (South). Liz will be working across the East of England Cancer Alliance, working on all types of cancers in delivering the genomics agenda. She will be working with teams in different hospitals and in different cancer specialities. Genomics is an exciting new area of treatment, developing individual treatments based on an individual’s DNA. It makes new genomic treatments much better able to be precisely targeted on each individual patient. Liz has promised to keep us, in COPES, updated as to any new developments and we’re hoping she will pay us a visit at a coffee morning, to tell us about her work.
COPES – supporting the CNS team in their career development.
One of our AIMS at COPES is education. We are very happy to have supported four of the CNS team at Southend and Basildon Hospitals, in meeting their expenses at the National CNS Conference in Liverpool this summer. We are sure that the nurses will return from the conference with new ideas and having developed their skills.
COPES Aims
We are aware that you may not actually know what our aims for COPES are. We have attached a sheet to the newsletter, and listed them below. We also have an info sheet called ‘COPES Aims in Action’ which you may be interested in.
THANK YOU!
We are very grateful to The Belfairs Lodge for their generous donation of £250. This donation was made via a link with one of our great supporters, Barbara, who was a good friend of our member, Jan Slatford. Between them, they have donated so much to COPES over the years. We will be putting the donation to good use. More details later……..
ALL THE BEST OF WISHES…….
Several of our members and their families are going through a tough time, health-wise at the moment. We send them our very best wishes for the best of outcomes for their treatment and recuperation.