Sarcoma UK is delighted to announce Sarah Randall as the winner of our Tricia Moate Award 2024.
Tricia Moate worked tirelessly as a nurse and as a patient advocate for sarcoma. Sadly, she died from sarcoma in December 2018. This award is dedicated to her memory.
As part of this award, Sarcoma UK offers sponsorship to allied health professionals (AHPs) and nurses involved in the care of sarcoma patients to attend next year’s British Sarcoma Group (BSG) annual conference.
Sarah is a Clinical Nurse Specialist at the Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton. She was instrumental in establishing a sarcoma CNS team at the hospital trust having gained temporary funding from Surrey and Sussex Cancer Alliance.
Her role involves providing information and support for patients on the diagnostic pathway; running nurse-led clinics for sarcoma patients; communicating with specialist sarcoma centres to provide seamless support for patients and ensuring all organisations involved in care have relevant up-to-date information and that patients remain ‘in the loop’ at all times.
Sarah also supports oncology clinics and provides ongoing support, information and advice for sarcoma patients in the hospital’s catchment area. She provides leadership to junior staff members within the sarcoma and wider cancer CNS team and is the lead for service development in sarcoma services at University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust.
Sarah is an advocate of Sarcoma UK’s work. ‘I often push Sarcoma UK’s Support Line and website to patients. I tell them, “if you are going to look things up on the internet, go to the Sarcoma UK website as sarcoma is very specialist and very rare”.’
Sarah says the Tricia Moate Award, and attending the BSG, will have ‘multiple’ benefits to the team’s work. It will help raise the profile of the sarcoma service within the Trust’s cancer division. Having already secured temporary funding, it is hoped the award will boost her business case to secure substantive funding from the Trust. Sarah aims to expand nurse-led care, which would free up consultant time and reduce admissions.
Visiting BSG would bring networking and education opportunities, she said. Sarah believes knowledge gained at the event will enable her to draw up robust standards and guidelines for local services that feed into specialist centres – the ultimate aim being for these standards to be adopted by sarcoma networks across the country.
Attending the conference will also give her the chance to hear about trials and new developments in the field, something she feels that local centres can often miss out on.
