For the past two years, our team has been working to test whether our solutions can be used as complementary support offerings for people impacted by cancer. This blog posts tells you a bit more about this important new additional direction for our work, and some of the results we have seen so far.
The impact of the Be Well Plan in promoting the mental health of people living with and beyond breast cancer.
Breast cancer survivors face a multitude of challenges beyond their diagnosis, often grappling with mental health issues and emotional distress. Our team, together with the Supportive Oncology Research Group at the University of Adelaide, ran a feasibility study focused on evaluating the effectiveness of the Be Well Plan for women diagnosed with stages I-IV breast cancer.
By exploring both quantitative and qualitative data we showed promising results by improving the mental wellbeing, depressive symptoms, and anxiety among participants who completed the program. Results highlighted that participants were given new ways to live with their diagnosis and treatment journey, as demonstrated by one of the participants:
“I was in a real victim mode, I was dying, and I was, I don't know, everything hurt, and I just focused on the negatives and now I'm focusing on the positives.”
This work was made possible by Ruth Murchland, who provided a generous bequest to support this work and facilitate the results being published in an open access peer-reviewed journal article which you can find here.
Co-designing a new version of the Be Well Plan to help people with Multiple Myeloma manage the mental health impact of their diagnosis.
The promising results from the above mentioned work focused on breast cancer survivorship, set the scene for further work with people living with a cancer diagnosis.
Our team was able to join a successful MRFF grant for a three year project to study the roll out of a tailored co-designed version of the Be Well Plan for people living with multiple myeloma. This important work allows our team to further research how we can help people manage the mental side of cancer treatment.
Being successful in this grant is a further testimony to the impact of our work and allows us to further strengthen our collaborative research efforts with a brilliant team, including the project lead Hannah Wardill, Be Well Co staff Matthew Iasiello and Joep van Agteren, Be Well Lab members Dan Fassnacht and Kathina Ali and a range of other collaborators including Myeloma Australia.
We will provide you with more detailed updates on this project later in 2024. Can't wait and want to reach out now? Send us an email at hello@bewellco.io.
