About Us – Do you have a new Cancer Diagnosis? Health Equals Freedom
About Us – Do you have a new cancer diagnosis? We can help you.
A new cancer diagnosis is confronting; we know we have experience with this and can help you.
Health Equals Freedom – Making Sense of Cancer was founded to provide advocacy and support to you or a family member with a new cancer diagnosis.
We know how scary this time is as we have been there too!
You may have noticed that there seems to be more people with cancer around friends, colleagues and family? Perhaps the diagnosis of CANCER has been given to you?
What is a Healthcare Navigator?
After a cancer diagnosis, we can be there every step of the way on your health recovery journey no matter where you are located in Australia using our Telehealth services!
A Healthcare Navigator is medically savvy, works for you and will stand by you!
If you engage an independent professional healthcare navigator, they attend medical meetings with you and your healthcare team, either face-to-face, by phone or video link.
Your navigator’s job is to listen to the information provided by the doctor or whoever and explain to you and your family anything that needs clarification and advocate on your behalf if needed.
Asking questions of your doctors on your behalf, recapping and summarising for you to look at later – can be so valuable. It is easier to digest information when you are relaxed and at home.
This support is important, especially at diagnosis, as you may be meeting multiple healthcare professionals. Your health professionals may not always communicate in a way you understand, or to each other well.
Not only is it confusing, it is very complex and hard for you as a patient to keep on top of it all, as you have enough to deal with – your emotions for one! A bit of navigation and project management can really help.
Your cancer healthcare team
You may be seeing your GP, surgeon, radiation oncologist, and medical oncologist, nurse to name a few. Complex results will be coming in from pathologists, radiologists and genetic oncologists, and the nurses are also trying their best to help you!
This is a large number of health professionals trying to assist with your cancer. But seeing so many experts at this time can be intimidating, frightening, overwhelming and disjointed.
Discussion during coaching sessions outside of the visit to the healthcare professional, with your own patient advocate can really assist. This can help if difficult or complex decisions are needed regarding the treatment pathway. Many of the cross-roads in your cancer journey are hard and you need caring support.
Our Approach
We offer evidence-based resources to provide you with a reliable service to support you at this difficult time of cancer diagnosis. Consideration of all aspects of your life and health are taken together – Wholistically.
If Health Equals Freedom – Making Sense of Cancer’s team cannot provide assistance to you and your family, we will refer to organisations or services that can. Many helpful resources are found on our resources page, you can refer to them whenever you like.
On our website we have attempted to make complicated topics easier, this way you can refer to these often and use the explanations, checklists, tips and other resources quickly as there is no time to waste!
1) We help you navigate difficult decision-making with a cancer diagnosis
Sometimes you may not have family members or trusted friends that can help you navigate the complex healthcare system.
Often your family and friends can make the situation worse, either through strong opinions or misinformation.
At Health Equals Freedom – Making Sense of Cancer we provide you with customised decision point support coaching. Coaches are by definition support – they don’t do, that is all up to you! Allowing you to feel confident in your own decision-making regarding your cancer is very important.
An independent health advocate can support you and your family during decision making.
Some of the ways this is done can include:
- seeking other opinions or presenting options,
- helping you navigate the cancer treatment network,
- research new approaches for you to consider,
- investigate access to clinical trials, and
- facilitate compassionate access to drugs if needed.
Our team has extensive experience in health advocacy from a family-lived perspective have extensive training in cancer-related treatments and the newest approaches to therapy.
At Health Equals Freedom – Making Sense of Cancer – we also provide family group coaching. This can help your family members if they are not coping with your diagnosis or how you are going.
2) We help you to get the best of your healthcare professionals service
Don’t get us wrong, what your team of doctors tell you, whatever your stage or type of cancer is very important! We work with your doctors for you to get the best result possible in these difficult circumstances.
Know you have the opportunity to make changes and decisions about your care that will improve your health. For example, surgeons are interested in surgery, and medical oncologists are interested in chemotherapy. The order treatment is given may be important. At any juncture you can ask questions to clarify as you need to feel confident.
Many people are not aware that they can question their health professionals about options and have the right to do so at any point.
Quite a few of the treatments your healthcare professionals have in store for you are literally designed to knock you off your feet and knock cancer out of you. It is the ‘fight’ or competition of your life, you want ‘to win’ and turn your health around, which you CAN!
Winning over and becoming a cancer thriver is possible with hard work, good luck and the right environment, you can do it!
3) We help by empowering you to be as healthy as possible
While doctors will aim to help you, especially if you have had a CANCER diagnosis – YOU actually have the POWER to take charge of what you do (even the medications you take), eat, and think with the knowledge that your body CAN heal and repair itself if given the opportunity.
Asking questions and challenging your treatments is empowering and important. Most people like you don’t know that they can have this personal power over their cancer treatments and approach. The ability to make your own decisions is very important in your cancer recovery.
Sometimes the treatments that doctors use in oncology are experimental and have only been used on a few patients, you may or may not want to take the chance, that is up to you, but you need to understand this in advance.
Time is of the essence, however, sometimes the treatments can make your quality of life worse because of their toxicities and side-effects. It is KEY to ask questions and become comfortable that you are making choices, even if you are feeling very sick. Ideally at the beginning of your treatment, so you know what you are in for and what the consequences of these decisions are. Sometimes taking the time to consider the best steps is a good investment that could save you time, money and lead to better health outcomes for you.
Steps that you can take
Putting the right things on, in and around your body can reap amazing changes even if your health history is really bad, with a few small tweaks in a better environment your body will work better. This is the exciting thing; making changes can add up to improvements in the way your body is working and healing.
Certainly, things you choose to do, e.g. the food you eat or the quality and quantity of your sleep, or reducing stress, may have bigger impacts than others. You CAN simply choose what works best for you and supports the commitments to your short-term and long-term health recovery.
There is some good news amongst this doom and gloom. Today, almost 7 in 10 Australians will survive for at least 5 years after a cancer diagnosis and in some cancers the survival is as high as 90% and it is steadily increasing with improvements in care and treatments . Or in other words 9 people out of 10 live on, which is good news in the cancer diagnosis landscape. This could be the case for you too!
The most common cancers in Australia (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) are prostate, breast, colorectal (bowel), melanoma and lung cancer (Cancer in Australia, AIHW 2019).
When you have a diagnosis, you may want to do as much as possible as quickly as possible, or you might need to take baby-steps. Everyone is different and your cancer journey is your own, not your doctor’s, family’s or anyone else’s, but your own. Whatever you choose is correct in your cancer journey and should be supported!
At Health Equals Freedom – Making Sense of Cancer – we are here to guide you with health advocacy with practical evidence-based resources to support you no matter what changes you decide to make on your journey!
Let’s make sense of cancer together.
Because after all your Health Equals Freedom!
Yours in good health,
Health Equals Freedom Team
Information and Support Pack, Cancer Council of Australia, 2018.
Emotions and Cancer, Cancer Council of WA, Australia, 2016.
McFarland et al., 2016. Clin. Adv. Haem and Onc. 14(12): 999-1009.
