10. Creative Radiotherapy Communication/Stuff
You wouldn’t really know this, but I am *SUPER* passionate about enhancing healthcare experiences - especially within Radiotherapy.
There’s a super unique opportunity within radiotherapy to become more innovative, more person-centred, more creative, and in turn more sensitive, and more engaging.
You might be wondering what exactly is Radiotherapy? Well, you wouldn’t be alone.
It’s a cancer treatment, that’s the cheapest one & has the best curative rates, and causes some of the least side-effect issues out of current cancer treatment options. Despite around 1/3 of the whole UK population (that’s around 20 million) will have had/will have/ or currently having radiotherapy - a huge % of the population don’t know what it is.
This has huge knock-on effects for the service from student recruitment, different commissioning of services/protocols within different areas - blurring the patient experience & care outcomes, government funding, commissioning of workforce & technology upgrades, workforce retention and trial accessibility, and perception of treatment for patients and loved ones.
Things are a-changing. But it’s slow. Luckily there’s a few of us slowly bringing in more human research - qualitative and creative and real.
My work is part of that. From fun smartphone apps, to fun conferences, drawing reflections from clinical practice to enhance practice, to comic books for students and patients learning about / how to do radiotherapy.
My ongoing-PHD research is on this kind of stuff too.
Old stuff here: http://radiotherapysmizz.tumblr.com
Academic poster (won best poster) showcasing my work I did creating the 1st (fun) personal patient radiotherapy info app. The key word here is fun - as in bright, easy, multiple methods of communicating information - and levels up in depth as you desire. from fun animated gifs to videos of the process.
I have drawn many things for radiotherapists. Most recently is this comic for an academic poster on LGBTQ+ experiences within the radiotherapy pathway (2020).
This booklet/comic has been commissioned by The Brain Trust - and is a whole guide to be used for teenagers with a brain tumour diagnosis and going through radiotherapy. It’s more fun, useful, thoughtful and engaging than most things that is out there. Released soon in 2020.