Inspired To Soar

40 days to #50 ⏳✨

15 years between these two photos. Meet my 18 year old and 33 year old selves 🖤
At 18, I'd already lived multiple lifetimes. My mum was diagnosed with cancer when I was 13 🎗️ and I stepped into adult responsibilities overnight. She passed when I was 17, and what should've been temporary became permanent.

More responsibility didn't mean more power. I felt more powerless than ever 💔
No lightness. No freedom. A university course in Nigeria I never chose, and wasn't ready for 📚 Two years of struggle I'd never known before.

Relief came when I finally returned to the UK 🇬🇧

I knew what it meant to be silenced when I had so much to say 🤐 The conditioning runs deep. Even after leaving, the negative words stayed in my head for years. Secrecy teaches you to wear a mask, until it cracks 🎭

Then everything shifted 🌱 I discovered human rights in my final year at uni in London. Finally, language for my drive for justice. That led to a Masters in International Development and Human Rights 🎓

At 33, knowledge in hand, ready to take on the world 💪 That young woman knew her voice mattered, and she used it 🗣️
Years later, my late sister's cancer diagnosis, and then my own, opened my eyes to the racial inequities in our health system.
That's when I realised: I had the knowledge, the experience and the expertise to change things 🔑

Who knew my hardest seasons would birth my life's work as a patient advocate 🌟
To anyone reading this: no part of your story is wasted 🙏🏾 Don't carry it alone. Build your community. Let them help you heal 💛 In time, mine the lessons in your new normal.
More of this journey in my book Navigating Your New Normal
📖 Link here: https://amzn.to/3IDV3GV

Ethnic minority communities remain significantly under-represented in UK cancer clinical trials and genomic research 🧬⚠️, relative to their share of the population and, more importantly, relative to their share of the disease burden. 🧬

That matters beyond fairness on paper. Trial data shapes which treatments get approved, at what doses, and how side effects are understood. Genomic databases increasingly shape how personalised cancer care is delivered. If a population isn’t well represented in either, the treatments built from that data may simply work less well for them, or come with less certainty about how they’ll respond.

This isn’t a niche research problem. It’s a live equity issue with outcomes attached.

We’ll be discussing practical ways organisations, researchers and pharma partners can start closing this gap at the webinar on 9th September. Registration link in the comment.

One of the hardest truths in UK cancer data 😔: Black and Asian patients are consistently more likely to be diagnosed at a later stage than White patients, across multiple cancer types. Later stage means fewer treatment options and poorer survival. 📉

It’s tempting to read that as inevitable. It isn’t. Research points to a mix of contributing factors: lower symptom awareness in some communities, delays in help-seeking shaped by past experience of not being believed, and variation in how quickly concerns are acted on once someone does come forward.

Every one of those is something a system, and the people working in it, can actually change.

This is one of the areas we unpack properly on 9th September, not to dwell on the statistics but to get practical about what closes the gap. Flyer attached for registration.

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A question worth sitting with: when you picture a cancer screening waiting room, who’s in it? 🪑🤔

UK research consistently shows ethnic minority communities are under-represented in cancer screening uptake compared to the White population, even where invitations are sent equally. The reasons are layered: trust built (or broken) in a first appointment, language and how information is explained, fear shaped by community experience, and whether the person in front of them looks like someone who understands their life.

None of that is about people not caring about their health. It’s about a system that hasn’t yet built itself around the realities of every community it serves.

That gap between who’s invited and who attends is one of the threads we’ll be pulling on 9th September, alongside practical ideas for closing it. Details on the flyer. 📊

“We hear you” has become one of the most-used phrases in healthcare equity work of the last few years. 📣😕

I want it to mean something again.

Hearing someone is the very first step, not the destination. What comes after is the part that actually shifts outcomes: a plan, a named owner, a timeline, a visible first action, and a way of reporting back that the community can see and hold you to.

That’s the work. It’s slower than a statement. It’s also the only version that changes anything.

We’ll be working through what that sequence looks like in practice at the webinar on 9th September, register via the link in the flyer. 🔗

Here’s where traditional engagement models in health tend to fall down: the feedback loop. 🔁

Ask 💬 → Listen 👂 → Write it up 📝 → Silence.

The step that’s missing is going back to the people who told you their truth and saying, clearly, “here’s what we heard, here’s the plan, here’s what we’ve already started.” Then reporting back on progress, even when progress is small.

At Inspired To Soar, this sits underneath everything we do. We’d rather help an organisation take one small, honest, sustained step and be able to prove it, than watch another grand strategy launch with fanfare and quietly stall by Q3.

On 9th September we’re talking through exactly how to close that loop, practically, in your organisation. Flyer attached has the details. 📌

Something I think about often: for a lot of people, talking about their cancer experience isn’t a neutral act. 💭

It can mean going back to a diagnosis, a delay, a conversation with a clinician that didn’t go the way it should have, a moment they felt unseen. That takes something out of a person. 💔

So when organisations ask for those stories and then nothing visibly changes, it’s not just a missed opportunity. It reads as confirmation that speaking up doesn’t matter, which makes the next person even less likely to come forward.

This is exactly why the follow-through matters as much as the listening. It’s why I built an entire event around what happens after people share.

If you’re planning any kind of patient or community engagement work this year, I’d start here: what will you show people you did with what they told you? 👇

Find out at the webinar. Full details in the flyer.

Quick distinction that matters more than it sounds: consultation and engagement are not the same thing. 🔍✨

Consultation asks people what they think, ticks a box, moves on.

Engagement means people from the community are in the room when solutions are designed, not just when problems are described. It means the relationship outlasts the meeting.

If your organisation is working on cancer health inequalities, ask yourselves honestly: are the people affected shaping the response, or just describing the problem to people who’ll shape it without them?

That distinction sits right at the heart of what we’ll be unpacking on 9th September. Full details and registration via the flyer attached.