Social Work and Cancer

I write this opinion piece as a cancer nurse. It is my privilege to have this opportunity to present my perspective on the contribution of oncology social workers as a clinician who has worked alongside, learnt from, and partnered with oncology social work colleagues in Australia, and the United Kingdom. There will be much that I am unaware of regarding the nuanced specialisation of social work practice because so much of what social workers do, like nurses, is invisible to the untrained eye and happens behind closed doors. And yet it has profound impact on peoples’ capacity to tolerate and live through, or with, a diagnosis of cancer. Cancer is a disease of the collective. Its utterance in a clinical consultation irrevocably changes the lives of all impacted by its unwelcomed presence. It is, as Kleinman (1988) so powerfully articulated, defined by, and experienced through the personal and social.