COPES Gynae Oncology Support

Hi! We’re the COPES executive committee. We’re a volunteer group. We’re now looking for more ways to help our members, all women who have been diagnosed with gynaecological cancers, to feel better.

We’ve been supporting women for going on for 20 years. We were set up to support women going through diagnosis, treatment, into thriving and surviving.

We’ve achieved such a lot and have been recognised for our good work by other charities and at the APPG on ovarian cancer. In past years, we refurbished relaxing space for women to get their latest info from the Gynae oncology team; we’ve bought extra special equipment to treat women undergoing brachytherapy; we’ve bought a more comfortable examination couch; we’ve raised spirits with our many fun events.

We’re currently raising funds to buy more comfortable equipment for the Gynae cancer clinic at Southend and Basildon hospitals, as well as organising and regular on-going monthly support groups, living well with cancer events and doing awareness-raising talks.

All the exec committee are volunteers, all are patients and ex-patients, we’ve all been there! We are very much a peer-to-peer support organisation. However we meet regularly with the Specialist Nurses and the Consultants. We work very closely with them.

Our members always enjoy our Coffee Mornings and special events. There’s lots of laughter, but when sad times come, we can support at those times too. It’s a real boost to be with people who totally understand.

We aim to organise more member’s events, now that the loneliness of COVID is over. All funds raised will be directly benefitting women with Gynae cancers, whether in the diagnosis phase or the living with treatment phase.