Celebrating the joy in work: the Moondance Cancer Awards

Megan Mathias - Chief Executive, Moondance Cancer Initiative

Last Autumn, as we were deciding Moondance Cancer Initiative’s plans for 2022, I was reminded of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 2016 programme on ‘joy in work’ and a particular quote from the report struck a chord with me:

“ Clinician burnout has been well-documented and is at record highs. The same issues that drive burnout also diminish joy in work for the health care workforce…

“Healthcare leaders need to understand what factors are diminishing joy in work, nurture their workforce, and address the issues that drive burnout and sap joy in work.”?

This sentiment resonates more today than ever. As Covid-19 itself dissipates, staff across Wales’ cancer services are facing unprecedented volumes of ‘backlog’ demand, and many patients are presenting with more acute disease, meaning they’re sadly harder to treat and harder to support.

As we planned for 2022, we asked ourselves how can we help to bring some joy to people working tirelessly at all stages of cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment pathways across Wales, and showcase great work that is helping us achieve the shared goal of fewer people dying from cancer.

And so, the Moondance Cancer Awards were born.

Moondance Cancer Initiative exists to find, fund and fuel brilliant people and brave ideas to make Wales a world leader in cancer survival.

The awards will bring together these bold thinkers to share ideas and make connections and is a way for us thank staff across NHS Wales and its partners who have maintained, and innovated, cancer services despite the extraordinary and difficult circumstances of the last two years.

And we also want to showcase that improvement is happening, that teams across the country are regaining more control over their workloads by innovating and transforming their services.

Finding the joy in work is vitally important to achieving our shared goal of a Wales where more people survive cancer. We hope this night of celebration will help to rekindle that sense of joy, acknowledge the achievements of the past, and look forward to the extraordinary ones yet to come.

Enter now: moondance-cancer.wales/awards ?????? ??????????????????????????????????????????

Nominations close on April 25th. The awards celebration takes place at Depot, Cardiff on Thursday, June 16th.

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