​Audrey Birt's own blog reveals the challenges of facing cancer and through it she has also has discovered the power of storytelling in healthcare

I was director of Breakthrough Breast Cancer in Scotland when I started blogging. I had wondered about doing a blog for some time but somehow it had never happened and I didn’t really know what my role as a blogger would be.

Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer again and I found my voice. It was a choice of course, I realised I could be open with regard to my diagnosis or keep it private. Having been through this before with an earlier diagnosis I knew that both take energy. Hiding vulnerability is a precarious business, somehow for me at least the more I stayed quiet I knew, given such a public role, the harder it would be.

So, I started my blog. I held it as a boundary between my private and public life and saw my audience (if anyone read it) to be the women who also went through this and their families. What I didn’t expect was the reaction of my own family to it and how it became valuable to them too.

My husband said in many ways it helped him understand what I was going through much better this time but that also made it harder. I suspect the same was true for my children who were much younger at my previous diagnosis and I tried my very best to shield them.

It’s such a strange experience to share your vulnerabilities with an unknown audience and I learned to not be surprised when people I hadn’t spoken to were up to date with my life. I know the openness and courage I found when I blogged gave me a strength in my role and I was a finalist for IoD director of the year the year after I started my blog.

Perhaps what was most beneficial to me as a person was the catharsis I found when I wrote things down. When I felt frustrated, scared, angry, the words were released on the page and I could let them go

Perhaps what was most beneficial to me as a person was the catharsis I found when I wrote things down. When I felt frustrated, scared, angry, the words were released on the page and I could let them go. Given my role I felt a responsibility to reflect information accurately and also relate some of my experience to our work in the charity. But what I also learned first hand was the power of lived experience as a way to influence services and care. In a world of medicine where nothing is believed without a randomised control trial, there is a resulting compelling call for the person's voice to be heard at an individual, a local and a national level to improve services.

One of the really inspiring benefits of blogging is that I became part of a world wide blogging community. I made friends across the globe, fellow members of the breast cancer club noone wanted to join. One such friend is Marie Ennis-O’Connor from Ireland who set up the award winning Journey beyond breast cancer blog, in which she connects people who write about their experience and writes herself about her own journey.

I'm so very pleased she has agree to come and talk to us here in Scotland as she now travels the world talking about the role social media can play in health care improvement. It’s an important role the Health and Social Care Academy seeks to play, bringing the voice of lived experience to the thinking around the future of health and care, and so we are delighted she is offering this vital masterclass.

If you want to learn how to engage differently as a policy maker and health and social care professional, if you want to get your own blog started, if you want to hear about how other countries and cultures deal with this then do come along and meet Marie. She is inspiring and charming in equal measure. I for one can’t wait.

I will leave you with this quote from one of my blogs about what advocacy for change means to means to me.

“The tide is turning….. because it has to. And that tide has to have kindness and connection in its essence, these are at the core of well-being.I’m often described as a patient advocate and I always react to that description. I’m not a patient, I’m a person who advocates for others to be seen as that first, not merely a collection of symptoms. But that’s not only what my reaction is about I know; it’s because my interest goes well beyond the need to improve health and social care to looking at how we can promote and enable salutogenesis in our services and communities. No small challenge but if we don’t collectively see the need for that we will not tackle the huge issues we face in our society. “

Come and join Marie and I at the Academy masterclass and listen to a fresh voice and find your own too.

The Power of Storytelling: Why Stories Matter masterclass takes place on 22 Ocotober at 6pm at the Quaker Meeting House in Edinburgh. Email [email protected] to sign up.

Audrey Birt is an associate director of the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland and a Health and Social Care Academy champion.