It’s Cancer Chat’s 10th birthday!

10 years ago at CRUK, we looked round and saw that although other organisations in the UK were providing online communities for cancer patients, they were not carefully moderated. Many were not moderated at all and those that were relied on members reporting posts before moderators would act. This meant that there was a significant risk of members being given inaccurate or misleading information by other contributors. Sometimes this might be out of another member’s misguided sense of wanting to help, in other situations people who supported conspiracy theories about conventional medicine were posting information and from time to time we could see that people were exploiting cancer patients by callously promoting expensive unproven alternative therapies to them.

To address this, we decided to start a properly moderated forum where members could feel safe that any misleading information posted would be challenged or removed. Cancer Chat was born.

Our specially trained moderators work from home and moderate every post on Cancer Chat to make sure that no misleading information is posted. If they are unsure about anything they can check things out with our highly skilled forum manager, who has many years’ experience of managing online communities, or one of her deputies. They can also check things out with the helpline nurses if they need to.

A few years ago, we introduced an “Ask the Nurse” section to the forum so that members could get information from a medical professional as well as support from other members of the online community. This has been a great success and has added another skill to our helpline nurses adding variety to their role.

Cancer Chat has been hugely successful, we currently have over 40,000 members with around 1,000 new members signing up each month. You can look at it here www.cancerchat.org.uk 

If you have any question please contact martin.ledwick@cancer.org.uk