Gill Donovan

For more than 30 years Gill Donovan has been working to improve the quality of care provided to patients in her charge. Gill's unique ability to identify and articulate the needs of cancer patients culminated in her establishment of Cancer Care Cymru (CCC), a Welsh cancer charity that trains and funds specialist nurses to deliver sustained treatment and support to patients alongside that given by the NHS.

Gill, the creative inspiration behind the Charity's role and work, considers that specialist nurses are uniquely placed to complement and supplement the service provided to cancer patients by the NHS. When CCC was launched, the nurses who joined Gill did so because they believed in the concept of care that she espoused. Gill's work, or vocation, is based upon her profound understanding of the human, as well as medical, needs that must be addressed for cancer patients to combat their disease.

When Gill began nursing, aged 17, she was placed on a ward where a man lay dying from cancer. Palliative care was then insufficiently advanced, and the man was left screaming with his pain. The other medical staff drew a curtain around him so that he wouldn't distress the remaining patients and their visitors. Gill went to talk to him. From this experience, grew Gill’s inspiration for Cancer Care Cymru. The value of her patient-centric approach has been recognised by the Minister of Health, who asked Gill to sit on the National Institute for Clinical Excellence as a patient representative. This board of individuals is invited by the Government to ensure equal access to treatment across the UK. She has served in that post for seven years voluntarily, alongside her clinical and other roles. Gill provides continuity of care from diagnosis through treatments.

Gill is an internationally-renowned expert in the field of breast cancer and has developed one of the UK's first nurse-led chemotherapy clinics, where she not only assesses patients but prescribes their treatments. These clinics are being replicated elsewhere in the country and in other medical fields due to the undeniable benefits they bring - a combination of medical expertise, an understanding of the practicalities of care, as well as a means of alleviating the waiting lists and financial concerns that burden the NHS. Gill's post is financed entirely by charitable means. Another innovation is Gill's pioneering "phone-back" service, where a patient is telephoned as many as four times within the first 48 hours of the delivery of chemotherapy. This has been professionally recognised and is award-winning.

Gill's inspiration was once again the patients, who communicated that they often felt isolated and forgotten by the hospitals between treatments. Audits of the phone-back service overwhelmingly confirm that patients believe that their care and treatment is enhanced, with interventions introduced speedily enabling side effects and other problems to be more effectively managed and anticipated. Gill can ensure that those side effects are typically counteracted within 48 hours, whereas previously limitations on consultant time meant that such control could take up to six weeks to achieve.

She believes in the need to use the very skills that patients themselves can bring. Their views are currently heard in only a small way - and they need to be as loud as those of the politicians and professionals who develop and inform cancer strategy. Gill has spent her career amplifying those voices.

“The Cancer Care Cyrmu model is a shining example of what can be achieved by just one person with the necessary vision and drive to make it happen.”

Dr. Peter Barrett-Lee , Clinical Oncologist, Velindre Hospital, Cardiff

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