Excellent video resources win top-notch award | News

It’s been a hugely successful year for Trust dietitians, Lindsey Allan and Nicola Porter. Earlier this year they launched a series of 18 diet and cancer information videos for patients after winning a bid for £5,000 funding from Royal Surrey Charity. 

Last week, Lindsey and Nicola’s video resources won an Innovation Excellence Award in the Macmillan Professionals Excellence Awards, as well as being shortlisted earlier in the year for a Complete Nutrition Magazine Award and winning the Digital Award at the recent Surrey Heartlands AHP Awards. 

The collection of short, two to three minute videos provides invaluable help to patients following their cancer diagnosis by answering frequently asked questions, such as ‘what should I eat if I’m losing weight?/losing muscle and strength?/finding it difficult to swallow?/feel sick?/have diarrhoea?’

 Since their launch in February, the videos have received 8,000 views on YouTube and Royal Surrey’s website and have been watched by people from across the world.

Lindsey said: “It’s wonderful to see the videos recognised with this latest award and hopefully this will extend their reach even further, so that more patients and healthcare professionals can benefit. We have been wanting to produce these for eight years and were delighted to have input from a former colleague Adele Hug who played an important role in their development.

“The idea behind producing them came from our awareness that people are often searching online for information, rather than reading our patient leaflets, and the advice they’re finding can sometimes be contradictory or unclear. Our diet and cancer videos give an accurate and reliable, user-friendly way of getting answers at the exact time they’re needed.”

The videos were developed following consultation with patients, clinicians, representatives from Clinical Commissioning Groups and the World Cancer Research Fund.

As well as receiving extremely positive feedback from patients and healthcare professionals, the videos have been welcomed by cancer charities, and many of these have included links on their website including Macmillan, Roy Castle, Prostate Project, Target Ovarian Cancer, Melanoma Focus and Action Kidney Cancer.

(Pictured above, left to right: Lindsey Allan and Nicola Porter.)