On Thursday, the first day of Volunteers Week, Macmillan Cancer Support held their Thanks to You Awards, with Calum Reid, from the Trust’s Macmillan Centre, one of 36 finalists across six categories.
Calum was nominated for the With Ambition category, and while that ultimately went to Bridport’s Jo Millar, founder of The Living Tree, Calum certainly deserved his recognition.
As Volunteers Week continues, here is his story.
Pre-COVID, driven to make something positive from his experience of bowel cancer, Calum was part of a colorectal group of patients looking at Self-Supported Management, and expressed an interest in becoming a Macmillan Volunteer. His application took longer than normal due to lockdown and all hospital volunteers being stood down.
Not one to miss an opportunity, he expressed an interest in becoming a HOPE (Help to Overcome Problems Effectively) course facilitator, having previously been a participant in HOPE. And by the time he was cleared to be a Lancashire Teaching Hospitals volunteer, he was also a HOPE facilitator.
Calum took to the volunteer role like a natural, and one of the first things he did was to highlight the lack of awareness for patients on wards and in clinics of the Macmillan grant, and the entitlement to free prescriptions. He devised a poster for each, that the Trust illustrator produced, and these posters and flyers are now all over the Trust. It is no coincidence that MacMillan have helped award over £90,000 in grants in 2022, when in the whole of 2021 that figure was £33,000.
Calum's next vision was a colorectal support group. He set one up at a local cancer centre off site that now has regularly monthly meetings, with numbers of attendees growing.
He is also a very active member of the Cancer Patient and Carers Forum. He regularly chairs the meeting and is determined that the group can be a force for good in improving the life of cancer patients.
Calum has now completed his first HOPE course as a facilitator and has been instrumental in helping set up our centre's courses for 2023.
LTH Macmillan centre manager Martin Bond said: “I cannot praise Calum enough for what he has done in the short time he has been a member of our team. He is a real asset and he has made an immeasurable impact in his time with the centre.”
