4 minute read
Interventional Radiology Committee Member Spotlight
Murray McLachlan
My direct experience with cancer began in 2006 when my long-term partner was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He made the decision to forgo chemotherapy after the cancer metastasised to his liver and died in 2007. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in early 2009 and had a successful radical prostatectomy soon after.
After leaving full-time work in 2011, after 35 years in the NSW public service, I became involved with Cancer Council NSW on a voluntary basis as the Policy and Advocacy Officer on the NSW Central Coast.
Following a mild stroke in early 2014 (that didn’t involve an interventional neuroradiologist performing clot retrieval!) I reassessed my voluntary work and pulled back on my previous consumer advocacy commitments.
However, as the effects of the stroke were relatively minor, I took up an opportunity in 2016 to join the Executive Committee of Cancer Voices NSW (CVN).
This totally voluntary organisation provides the independent voice of people affected by cancer, working to improve the cancer experience of the 50,000 people who are diagnosed in NSW each year.
CVN’s focus is on prevention, diagnosis, information, treatment, research, support and care, survivorship and policy. We do this by working in partnership with decision-makers and service providers, ensuring the patient perspective is heard from planning to delivery. I am currently the CVN Deputy Chair and Secretary.
My involvement in consumer representation and advocacy is to help ensure that the voices of those affected by cancer, and a range of other health conditions, are heard, listened to and incorporated as an integral element of health service provision.
It is only through genuine participation and involvement, at decision-making levels, that the needs of people who have had an experience with a lifechanging medical condition (be they a patient, survivor, carer, family member or friend) can be met.
The health consumer movement in Australia has a significant history, dating back at least to the changes that occurred in patient advocacy as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
Since that time, significant improvements have occurred across broader health areas that have meant that there is now an acceptance that patients have to be listened to as those who know best about their health condition. However, there is still a need for patients and consumers to be involved, from the initial stages of all health-related policy and program development, as knowledgeable and informed partners.
The IRC’s work, particularly its focus in the last two years on achieving specialty recognition for IR and INR, is central to the College as a whole and, more so, to the significant benefits that will come about for patients from recognition.
My contributions, I hope, are always based on two fundamental questions:
• What is this piece of work designed to achieve?
• How will it be benefit patients?
As a former teacher of English, I’m often able to look at written documentation with a view to helping to ensure that it is well-expressed, is spelt and punctuated correctly (!), and is both accessible and useful to its audience.
Having worked in the NSW public sector for all of my working life, I am also able to contribute an understanding of, and appreciation for, the processes that are necessary to achieve change in how health services are delivered. Such changes, given the nature of the Australian health environment, are often complex and difficult to achieve. They require an ongoing commitment to bring about continual improvements in the options and choices available to those affected by a range of health conditions.
It’s in this context that the achievement of specialty recognition is such an important aspect of the current work of the IRC.
There will be reason to celebrate when IRs and INRs are recognised as the highly-skilled, amazing people that they are, and I will be proud to have been involved in that achievement.
