Ovacome Summer 2014

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contact Ovacome
Chief executive:
Louise Bayne
Support services nurse:
Ruth Payne
Susan Morgan-Walters
Volunteer and
information manager:
Ruth Grigg
Administrator:
Sonia Vig
Support line: 0845 371 0554
020 7299 6650
Email: support@ovacome.org.uk
Administration line:
020 7299 6654
Email: ovacome@ovacome.org.uk
Address: Ovacome,
B5, City Cloisters, 196 Old Street,
London EC1V 9FR
Office hours:
Monday to Friday 10am – 5pm.
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www.ovacome.org.uk
Registered Charity Number 1058026
To register as a member of Ovacome
please send your details to the following
address or call the telephone number
above
© 2014 Ovacome
B5, City Cloisters, 196 Old Street,
London EC1V 9FR.
OVACOME is a voluntary organisation
and relies on donations
The information gathered in this newsletter
is from many sources and is provided for
guidance only. Ovacome has made every
effort to ensure that it is accurate but can
make no undertakings as to its accuracy
or completeness. All medical information
should be used in conjunction with advice
from medical professionals
Front cover: At the launch of
the Survivors Teaching Students
programme: the Clark family with
Ovacome’s patron, Jenny Agutter.
Image taken by Skye Brackpool at
Brightontogs.
Designed, produced and printed by
Berforts Information Press Ltd
www.informationpress.com
Welcome to Ovacome’s summer newsletter
We are entering a new era for cancer treatment, with a
staggering 50% of people diagnosed with the disease today
likely to be cured.
While ovarian cancer is one of the more tricky areas to treat,
Dr Richard Osborne, a consultant medical oncologist at Dorset
Cancer Centre, told Members’ Day attendees that he wanted to share
his “enthusiasm and optimism about progress in ovarian cancer treatment”.
It’s largely down to the personalised way that women are now being managed with
the introduction of multi-displinary teams working together to come up with tailored
treatment plans, rather than a one approach suits all strategy, he said.
The amount of options available to treat the disease is increasing with newcomers like
Avastin making positive change. And a new armoury of drugs, such as Olaparib (see
pages 6 and 7), are lining up to give the next generation of precision medicine.
So Cancer Research UK’s ambitious plans to see three-quarters of all cancer patients
surviving their disease in the next 20 years could well be within grasp. After all its
recent landmark figures show a massive improvement from the early 1970s, when just
a quarter of people diagnosed with cancer survived 10 years.
It’s true that for many with ovarian cancer their disease is caught too late to be cured.
But reassuringly it has become a disease that can be lived with using maintenance
medicine, such as hormone therapy, and top up chemotherapy or surgery. This allows
women to get on with their lives and to think of ovarian cancer more as a chronic
illness such as diabetes.
Hopefully this newsletter will help you get into this positive mindset. Happy reading.
Juliet Morrison, newsletter editor.
Thoughts from the chair
Hello. I am absolutely delighted to be writing this comment piece
as the new Ovacome chair of trustees.
I have been a supporter of the charity since I read Sarah Dickinson’s
article in Good Housekeeping in 1996 and have watched it grow (and
support the women I was working with) into the amazing organisation
that it is today.
I want to thank Noëline Young for all her hard work over the past 10 years as chair and
only hope that I can at least half fill her shoes - for this would be a job well done! I also
want to thank Noëline for her personal support which I hope will continue.
I was pleased to meet so many people at the recent Members’ Day. This was a truly
inspiring event with great speakers and the opportunity to ask questions and share stories
which made the day so much more valuable and enjoyable. There was a real sense of
what has already been achieved for women with ovarian cancer and of the way that
things will be improved in the future.
Thank you again for welcoming me and for giving me the opportunity to use my
experience (and time now the children have grown up!) to help steward the organisation
to continue to do great things.
Cathy Hughes.
Ovacome was founded in 1996 by Sarah Dickinson.
Trustees to the charity are: Cathy Hughes (chair), Simon Chantrey (treasurer),
Sean Kehoe (medical adviser), Clare Barsby, Adrian Dickinson and Noëline Young.
2 Phone Ovacome’s nurse led support line on 0845 371 0554 it together