An NHS cancer team has clocked up more than 1,100 miles, walking, cycling, swimming and even ziplining to mark Sarcoma Awareness Month, which was observed last month.
The 33-strong team from the London Sarcoma Service set out to ‘virtually’ cover the distance from London to every bone sarcoma centre in the UK and back, all to raise awareness of a disease many people have never heard of.
The team, drawn from the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) and University College London Hospitals (UCLH), set themselves the challenge of virtually travelling from RNOH to each of the UK’s specialist bone sarcoma centres. After smashing that target within the first week, the team decided to go further and complete the return journey too, setting a total goal of 1,026 miles. By 24 July, they had covered 1,106 miles – ahead of schedule.
Rather than a single activity, team members racked up the miles however they could: walking, running, swimming, cycling, dancing, playing cricket and tennis, white-water rafting and ziplining. Using the fitness app Strava, every walk to the shops or gym session counted towards the total. Some team members even kept going while on holiday, logging miles in Jersey, Montenegro and Bali, wearing their Sarcoma UK and Bone Cancer Research Trust (BCRT) T-shirts along the way.
The idea came from Abigail McCarthy, a physiotherapist who has worked in sarcoma services for more than 20 years. Abigail said: ‘Sarcoma Awareness Month felt like the perfect opportunity to highlight sarcoma and increase people’s knowledge of it, and we wanted something that would bring the whole team together across our two sites. We’d done something similar in the past, tracking activity as a team on Strava, and it really brought people together in a way that showed off just how varied our team is. Not many other cancers have a multidisciplinary team quite like ours with surgeons, oncologists, physios, nurses, histopathologists and admin teams all working side by side, and this challenge really showcased that.’
The team deliberately chose not to turn the challenge into a fundraiser, wanting it to be purely about awareness and team spirit. Suzy Hudson, Macmillan Personalised Cancer Care Lead for the sarcoma service and a physiotherapist by background, explained why raising awareness matters so much.
Suzy said: ‘Sarcoma is such a rare cancer and the awareness among the public and some healthcare professionals hasn’t really changed over the years. With cancers like breast, prostate and colorectal, there’s significant national funding behind public awareness campaigns and screening because of how many people are affected. Sarcoma simply doesn’t have that scale, so it’s much harder to get the message out. Even when people have heard the word ‘sarcoma’, many don’t understand what it actually is, and that’s exactly why campaigns like this matter, and why we wanted to get our whole team actively involved in raising awareness this year.’
A YouGov survey commissioned by Sarcoma UK in March this year found that 90 per cent of the public either don’t know what sarcoma is or have only a vague idea of the disease. Almost half of the respondents mistakenly believed it to be a benign condition.
Enda Guinan, Digital Communications Manager at Sarcoma UK, said: ‘Sarcoma is a disease that far too few people, including some healthcare professionals, know enough about, which is exactly why awareness campaigns like this matter so much. It’s brilliant to see an entire NHS multidisciplinary team, from surgeons and oncologists to nurses and histopathologists, giving up their own time to help raise that awareness. These are the people who care for sarcoma patients every single day and having them step forward to champion greater understanding of the disease carries real weight. The more people who understand what sarcoma is and how to spot the signs, the sooner patients can be diagnosed, and catching this disease early can be the difference between life and death.’
