Daniel Johnstone, PhD Candidate at University of South Australia, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Last week I had the privilege of delivering the closing keynote, ‘Advocate or Abdicate?’, at the Cancer Nurses Society Of Australia (CNSA) Annual Congress in Perth.
To a room of cancer nurses, the people who support those living with and beyond cancer through some of the most challenging of their lives, I posed a question that sits at the heart of my work: when the system falls short, do we advocate, or do we abdicate?
Advocacy isn’t a role reserved for the few. It’s a responsibility shared by everyone in the cancer care pathway. The line I kept returning to: I’m not asking some of you to do everything; I’m asking all of you to do something.
Drawing on my own lived experience of head and neck cancer and my research into how lived experience narratives build empathy and reflexivity in healthcare, I made the case that advocacy is a practice, not a personality trait, and one that every healthcare provider can choose to take up.
Grateful to CNSA for the invitation and to everyone who stayed for the final session and leaned into a challenging conversation.
Tomorrow I head to Melbourne for The Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC) annual meeting where I will be speaking across 3 sessions on emerging toxicities, the advocacy landscape in Australia, and the effective use of PROs in cancer care.”
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