An amazing day at PENNA22

My name is Julie Stephens (that’s me on the right of the picture with my colleague Andrea) and I work for Healthworks Newcastle as part of the Cancer Community Awareness team covering Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, South Tyneside and Nissan.

Our aim is to raise cancer awareness in the local community, to help people be more aware of early signs and symptoms, reduce cancer related heath inequalities across the region and to highlight the importance of screening programmes. I would like to say we think outside the box and try to be creative as possible.

It was an amazing experience for us to be a finalist at the Patient Experience Network National Awards (PENNA22) in the Integration & Continuity of Care category as part of the Northern Cancer Alliance “Busting Cancer Myths in the Community” team!

As part of the wider Cancer Community Awareness team, who cover parts of the North East, it was a great honour to be able to go to the event to represent the Northern Cancer Alliance, which I attended with my colleague Andrea Mackrell, from the County Durham Pioneering Care Partnership (PCP). It was a great day and we listened and learnt a lot about all the other projects that had been put forward.

Although we did not win our category, we did have an information board in place which had loads of photos and guidance on what we do and how we go about our work. This prompted some great conversations during the networking sessions and numerous people took note of our details to look at the Healthworks Newcastle website and get in touch with us to find out more about what we do.

Take a look at our video to get a flavour of the work we carry out…