A Focus on: Lung Cancer

If you have lungs, you can get lung cancer.

August 1^st is World Lung Cancer Day.

According to the World Health Organization, more people die from lung cancer every year, than from colon, breast, and liver cancers combined. Therefore, this special day’s mission is to raise awareness of the disease, as well as encourage better patient outcomes and recovery.

A Life in a Day with Lung Cancer aims to encourage the very same goal. By not only raising awareness of the disease, but by improving understanding of the experience of people who are living with it.

As an immersive simulation, it brings-to-life the varied challenges faced by patients as they navigate symptoms, treatment, side-effects, and scans alongside their normal routines.

Based on the face-to-face testimony of people who live its realities every day, the experience also uniquely exposes participants to many of the devastating emotional and social implications of living with lung cancer, in addition to its debilitating physiological impacts.

For example, one of the recurring stories from patients is the stigma they face after diagnosis. It is widely known that tobacco usage can cause lung cancer, so it is often assumed that they smoke – or have smoked – and therefore to blame for their disease. What is less understood is that lung cancer is also one of the most common work-related cancers, caused by exposure to dangerous carcinogens such as asbestos, silica dust and diesel fumes.

The truth is that if you have lungs, you can get lung cancer just the same as anyone else.

And if you do, treatment may remove or destroy your cancer, but that treatment will be gruelling, and you will find it hard not to worry about it coming back. Or your lung cancer may never go away completely, so you must undergo regular chemo, radiation, or other therapies to try to control the cancer for as long as possible. Whatever the outcome, it will be difficult and very stressful.

A Life in a Day with Lung Cancer enables participants to live as a patient for 24 hours. Making every individual imagine that it is happening to them, to increase insight, empathy and understanding of the real-world patient experience. Encouraging clinicians and health practitioners to see, feel and act differently in responding to the person beyond the condition, by immersing them in their stories. As one recent participant put it, “To know that the whole program was built on real patient feedback made the patient experience even more intense to me.”

This World Lung Cancer Day, we feel it is important to continue to not only raise awareness of the disease, but also increase understanding of the extremely challenging experience of all those who live with it every single day.

We now offer taster experiences of our lung cancer experience to pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. If you would like to know more, please get in touch…