Some cancer patients in North Yorks offered chance to administer own chemo at home

It's hoped the project will reduce stress and travel costs

Author: Kathy GreenPublished 30th Aug 2024

We're hearing how some cancer patients in North Yorkshire are being offered the chance to administer their own chemotherapy at home.

The project is being run by staff at York hospital for those on specific treatment plans.

Jo Bramall is part of the team involved: "There's some patients that have been diagnosed with a certain type of cancer and we want to offer them the opportunity to administer their treatment themselves at home with an injection. It's a relatively straightforward injection, it's you know, it's not going into a vein or anything. So it should be something that they can easily do themselves. Many people would do something similar if they've got, diabetes and they're injecting insulin it's like that type of injection really so it's quite straightforward."

"we're just hoping that by giving patients the opportunity to self administer, we're going to save them some time and stress and maybe make them feel less like a patient and more in control of their lives."

"I think it's really important that we can take healthcare to a patient and mobile chemo units they've got the place definitely, but it still involves the patient travelling. It still involves getting a team of nurses together to go out to patients, so to be able to give people the opportunity to be in their own home and look after themselves in their own home. The amount of time that they'll save specifically for this group of patients, you know, be quite significant for them."

"What we've done is we've looked into what groups of patients we could implement this pilot with and there's definitely more patients out there. This is this is just kind of like the tip of the iceberg but you've got to start somewhere, haven't you? So we've started with this drug because it is relatively simple to implement this. It should hopefully be able to lead on to bigger things so that we can give more patients the opportunity to have treatment at home."

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