Inspired To Soar

A belief that sits at the centre of everything I do: small, sustained steps beat grand promises almost every time. 🌱💪

I’ve watched plenty of organisations launch a bold equity strategy with real energy behind it, then quietly let it fade by the next budget cycle because the ambition was bigger than the plan for actually delivering it.

What tends to work instead is less dramatic. One concrete action. Reviewed. Adjusted. Repeated. Then the next one added on top. Over a year, those small steps compound into something a grand launch rarely does: durable, trusted change.

If your organisation has a strategy sitting in a drawer somewhere, this webinar on 9th September might be a good place to talk about what turning it into action actually looks like. Link in the comment. ✅

Cancer Research UK estimates that around 1 in 2 people born after 1960 in the UK will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life. 📊

Sit with that for a second. ⏸️ That’s not a rare event happening to someone else. That’s most of the people reading this post, most of the people in your organisation, most of the people your service exists to care for.

Given that scale, tackling racial disparities in cancer care and outcomes isn’t a “nice-to-have” line on a diversity action plan. It’s a core test of whether a health system is genuinely fit for purpose, and whether it’s robust enough to cope as cancer incidence continues to rise across the UK.

This is precisely the “all hands on deck” conversation we’re having on 9th September, statutory and non-statutory sectors, and communities themselves, in the same room. Flyer attached for the details. 🧡

Something I don’t always lead with: I have a family history of breast cancer. 🎗️ So this work has never been purely professional for me. 💙

Cancer Research UK puts the lifetime risk of a cancer diagnosis at roughly 1 in 2 for anyone born after 1960. That risk doesn’t check anyone’s ethnicity before it arrives.

But what happens after diagnosis, how early it’s caught, how well someone’s pain and symptoms are believed, whether the treatment options in front of them were tested on people who look like them, that part absolutely is shaped by race. And that’s the part we can actually change.

I’ll say more about what brought me to this work in a video later this week. For now, if this resonates, I’d love to see you at the webinar on 9th September. Flyer below. 🎗️

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. 🔗