Cancer v COVID-19: focusing on The Royal Marsden’s fight on both fronts

At Sunday, we’ve worked with The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust to publish RM, its quarterly print magazine for patients, staff and stakeholders, since 2009. For the autumn issue, we highlighted how the specialist cancer hospital has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to continue providing world-class treatment and care to people with cancer.

The hospital has worked tirelessly to maintain its services during the outbreak. As the virus overwhelmed intensive care units across the country and many cancer patients’ operations were cancelled, The Royal Marsden set up a COVID-protected Cancer Hub to ensure that patients in London and elsewhere could have the urgent surgery they needed. And the hospital’s researchers quickly launched several studies to investigate the links between COVID-19 and cancer.

Our content focused on the key workers on the front line and behind the scenes, such as the former Royal Marsden staff who returned to the hospital to join the effort against COVID-19, the lab assistant who tests cancer patients for the virus, or the staff members seconded to work on London’s NHS Nightingale Hospital at the height of the outbreak.

The Royal Marsden has had to adapt its working practices during the pandemic to keep its patients and staff safe without affecting standards of care. So we commissioned Fernando Volken Togni [https://www.fernandovt.co.uk] to create nine bright, bold illustrations for a feature that would highlight the new measures in an easy-to-digest format. Our feedback revealed that this really stuck a chord with readers.

We’ve never been prouder to work with The Royal Marsden, and to have played a very small part in its mission to continue helping cancer patients during such a difficult time for the NHS.