Breast Cancer Care’s New Pilot Service PROWESS

This week’s blog post comes from Ben Langston from Breast Cancer Care. Ben discusses Breast Cancer Care’s new support service, PROWESS, which is aimed at BME women recently diagnosed with breast cancer.

What is PROWESS?

Well, first of all, PROWESS stands for Promoting Recovery, Wellbeing, Equality and Support in Survivorship.

Breast Cancer Care has been working to improve their services and provide more tailored support to women from different ethnic and social backgrounds. We know that we need to support more women and make services relevant and easier to access.

We’ve talked to lots of women from different ethnic and social backgrounds who‘ve had breast cancer. With the help of all the women we spoke to, we’ve designed a new five-week pilot service called PROWESS which we’ll be delivering in South London between March and July 2015.

The PROWESS pilot service aims to provide information, practical advice and emotional support. There will also be support given by women who have had breast cancer and who have been trained by Breast Cancer Care to help others.

The service is open to anyone who has finished their hospital treatment for breast cancer in the last 12 months. PROWESS will last for 5 half days over 5 weeks (one-half day per week for 5 weeks).

When & Where Will PROWESS Start?

The first 5-day PROWESS service will start in March 2015 and will be held in the Deptford area of South London. All in all PROWESS will be delivered 4 times in 2015, but not all of them will be in Deptford, but other locations in South London too. Carrying out the service 4 times in 2015 will help us understand how good it is and what we might need to change or improve to make sure we can provide this kind of support locally to women all over London and the UK in the future.

What’s Happening Right Now?

We now have four volunteers who’ve been trained to carry out community engagement work. They are Marcia, Nevo, Lorraine and Yvonne. These four amazing ladies are going out into their local communities, visiting different places and spreading the word about the PROWESS pilot service. They’re working hard to recruit BME women onto the pilot, and I have no doubt they’ll do a great job (we’re aiming to find 60 women to take part in the pilot).As we’ve said, the service is open to anyone who’s finished their hospital treatment in the last 12 months. If you, or someone you know might want more information about the service or just chat about it then contact Ben Langston.