Initiatives in Oncology
Do not Give Up
Do not Give Up … Even with Advanced or Metastasized Breast Cancer
This information leaflet was prepared in partnership with the Portuguese League Against Cancer, Eisai FarmacĂȘutica, for distribution in various Health Units, as an awareness raising event for women with advanced or metastatic breast cancer.
We give our first thoughts to patients and their families, and help increase the benefits that health care provides.
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Awareness and information campaign
âIn epilepsy we all playâ
- Sport, especially as a team, favors the social integration of affected people and a better control of epileptic seizures
- Epileptic seizures can appear at any time, therefore, it can occur while practicing sports, but without being caused by it.
- For this reason, soccer coaches and referees from the Aragon region met to attend a training session on how to act when an epileptic seizure occur on the pitch, thanks to a training session promoted by the Aragonese Federation of Sport and Eisai
- Currently in Spain it is estimated that more than 500,000 people over 18 suffer from epilepsy
- Currently there is still a bad acceptance of epilepsy by society and a rejection of people who suffer from it mainly because of the lack of information and the persistence of false myths, hence the campaign slogan “In epilepsy, we all play “.
The awareness and information campaign “In epilepsy we all playâ, took place after the recent cases occurred in the course of football matches in Aragon and was driven by the Aragonese Football Federation and Eisai.
This vision recognizes that optimal care requires attention to multiple sources of distress that are common in illnesses such as advanced cancer. It foresees a continuum of cancer care in which palliative skills and services ease physical and emotional suffering and enhance the quality of cancer patients and families lives throughout the course of treatment.
There is no argument that palliative care should be integrated into cancer care from diagnosis to death, but significant barriers, attitudinal, behavioral, economic, educational and legal, still limit this needed care for a large proportion of people with cancerâŠ
But, the main question is⊠How can state-of-the-art cancer care with its focus on survival coexist with services that assist patients adapt to an uncertain future and support patients and families in planning and preparing for death? Does really the oncologists are well trained to explain properly the REAL situation to the patients? How about the emotional intelligence? What the patients think about this?
In integrating two seemingly disparate models of care, our program will address issues such as cultural gaps, patient and professional education. Both in their successes and their struggles, these exciting experiments in care delivery provide jumping-off points for expanded efforts to bring, comprehensive attention to comfort, quality of life and family caregiver support throughout the continuum of cancer care.
Eisai Spain, in collaboration with the Foundation â Actitud frente al cancerâ leading by Dra Ana Casas, PhD and breast cancer patient, the association of breast cancer patients â Creando lazosâ clinicians, psychologists and researchers around the country, have embraced the challenge of advancing that vision.
The project described in this briefing has translated theory into reality. Their efforts go directly to the questions of whether and how information skills have to be developed by clinicians and be integrated upstream in the continuum of cancer care.
How can state-of-the-art cancer care with its focus on survival coexist with services that assist patients adapt to an uncertain future and support patients and families in planning and preparing for death?
How will palliative services that are associated with hospice care be received by patients, their families and providers?
What exactly think the patients about this?
As small-scale pilot projects striving to build new models of care by State Hospitals, because the area of influence is Andalusia (18% of Spain) the sample size will be enough to achieve statistical significance, but the programmatic results are intriguing in a hopeful way that demands broader study.
Our hypothesis â when patients undergoing treatment also receive appropriate information and support by clinicians they experience improved quality of care and the burden on their caregivers declinesâ.
Clinicians participating in this project discovered that cancer treatment and emotional intelligence, communication skills do go together. They become enthusiastic supporters of this model because theyÂŽll see it improve the quality of care for their patients, thereby enhancing their own professional satisfaction as well.
The âWorking Together, Learning Together âTeam (WTLT) is composed of 25 oncologists (each one represents an important Hospital in Andalusia), 4 psychologists and three breast cancer patients as advisory board.
The oncologist, president of âActitud frente al Cancer âFoundation and also breast cancer patient, coordinated all the workshop. A psychologist (Pilar Abad) served as consultant and leader of the training program. A distinguishing characteristic of the program is the extent the knowledge to other. In fact, every clinician well trained supported their colleagues at their hospitals.
Which were our goals? What we expected to achieve?
Approach to care to minimize the effects of the oncologist’s own attitudes toward death on the therapy, the oncologist should explore and confront personal death attitudes before explain the situation to the patients.
WeÂŽre primarily concerned with the emotional conflicts and defense mechanisms of the individual. Special issues of conflict and defense arise in the dying person, and this approach addresses them in the hope of resolving the psychic crisis to the fullest extent possible. Dying is the ultimate crisis of ego development, and as such is associated with intense infra-psychic turmoil.
These solved problems will eventually result on:
- Ongoing communication among patients, families and oncologists.
- Advanced care planning and patient-centered decision making that is iterative and reflective of patients, values and preferences.
- Formal assessment and treatment of physical and psychosocial symptoms.
- Care coordination (also known as case management) to streamline access to services and monitor quality of care.
- Spiritual care.
- Anticipatory guidance in coping with illness and issues of life completion and life closure.
- Crisis prevention and early crisis management.
- Bereavement support.
- An interdisciplinary team (oncologists, psychologists, counselors and patients associations.
People, and patients in particular, are unique in the way they perceive and cope with the anxiety, and stress also the way one patient feels is different from the way another patient does.
Undoubtedly, it is related to the personality, strength, faith, and hope that patients are feeling toward their sickness. Consequently, people and patients can learn how to manage the stress and anxiety, and our final objective is to help patients to reduce their level of anxiety and stress so that they can increase their quality of live.
There are several techniques, that can help an impact on the way people (and patients in particular) perceive their feelings and how they manage the stress. Offering a powerful tool to control their anxiety and stress related with the way they perceive their disease, will help patients to experience better quality of live.
This hhc activity consist in offering Mindfulness workshops for Patients diagnosed of Breast Cancer in the two main Hospitals in Murcia (Spain): Morales Messeguer and Hospital Virgen de la Arritxaca.
What is âMindfulnessâ and what does it means?
There is a body of scientific evidence that support all the benefits of mindfulness specially controlling stress.
Mindfulness is a technique which can help people manage their mental health or simply gain more enjoyment from life.
Mindfulness describes a way of approaching our thoughts and feelings so that we become more aware of them and react differently to them.
Mindfulness can help Breast Cancer Patients to:
- Increase their awareness of your thoughts and feelings
- Manage unhelpful thoughts
- Develop more helpful responses to difficult feelings and events
- Be kinder towards themselves
- Feel calmer and able to manage stress better
- Manage physical health problem, like chronic pain.
Mindfulness is a technique which can help people manage their mental health or simply gain more enjoyment from life. It involves making a special effort to give your full attention to what is happening in the present moment â to whatâs happening in your body, your mind or your surroundings, for example â in a non-judgemental way. HERE and NOW
Mindfulness describes a way of approaching our thoughts and feelings so that we become more aware of them and react differently to them.
With this project, Eisai will contribuite to help patients with breast cancer, offering a very powerful tool to control their stress associated with their Breast Cancer processs.
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Epidays is an educational video game about epilepsy whose objective is that both patients and family members with epilepsy have at their disposal a practical guide to help them in the management of the disease serving as orientation, in everyday areas such as home or sport, as well as helping them to act in case of crisis.
In addition, this initiative has as a second objective, but no less important, to help alleviate the stigma and prejudice that fall on people suffering from the disease.
The project has the endorsement of the Spanish Society of Epilepsy (SEEP) and the Andalusian Society of Epilepsy (SADE), as well as of the associations of patients and family members throughout the Spanish territory: Association of Epilepsy of the Valencian Community (ALCE), the Galician Union of Epilepsy (UGADE), the Madrid Association of Epilepsy (AME) and the Spanish Association of People Affected by Severe Epilepsy (APEMSI).
- Childhood is the time of life in when epilepsy appears more frequently and its characteristics change as the child grows, as a reflection of cerebral maturation, coexisting transient epilepsies with excellent prognosis, with severe and refractory to treatment
- After the diagnosis, epilepsy bursts not only in the life of the child but also in the whole family, changing day-to-day habits and adopting other ones new and necessary, as security measures when facing any possible sudden and unpredictable crisis of the minor or teenager.
- To enform, educate and raise awareness about epilepsy, both children and adolescents is essential and necessary and with this aim this video game was developed from Eisai.