Radiotherapy & Healthcare Projects

About Smizz! 

You can follow me on twitter, visit my website and basically find out more about me and all this work, and all these cool projects by checking out the pages up in the left hand-side of this web-page. 

Sometimes it’s hard being a radiotherapy student. It’s hard for multiple of reasons, but for me one of the biggest hurdles is trying to find actual diagrams and illustrations of set-ups to help process and understand them in my head. As an artist- i learn from visualizations and drawing. I’m not a word, a number, or even a doing person. I’m a mixture of all of these, but in 2D. It’s especially hard to visual these set-ups when you’re in academic and have never even seen this set-up in practice before. Why are there no images for this stuff?  So, struggling to remember the process in practice I began to do what I do best - draw. I drew the pre-treatment radiotherapy set-ups, posted a few online and these became a lot more popular than I  had ever expected, proving to me that there is a need out there for this.

So now, I am slowly drawing every major set-up process for both pre-treatment and treatment set-up processes. Additionally I want to draw an A-Z of radiotherapy, drawing diagrams/illustrations for everything including how to do dose calculations, images to help remember basic definitions of things like ‘monitor units’, ect, and how to plan breast treatments, ect.  

I want to try and make radiotherapy processes to be understood by all! Whilst this would obviously benefit students the most, I believe even professionals would like to use it too.

I was extremely honoured to be invited to draw the round-up of global learning module MOOC on Enhancing Prostate Cancer care run by a few people including David Eddy at Sheffield Hallam University, UK.

#RONCrg is a twitter revision group for Radiotherapy & Oncology students, and professionals and service users, who want to get involved to discuss a fictional case.

Usually written by myself or Emma Russell, we develop fictional cases and medical notes, put a brief medical history on the blog and find a few facts to get people thinking before the timed event.

A set of prompted questions are designed to help keep the conversation flowing, and to cover all the bases from diagnosis, investigations, staging and grade, to treatment availability - and what would be specifically best for this patient using the medical history as a prompt, and then also supportive care. This is all done by using #RONCrg hashtag and the discussion is then archived onstorify. The storify link and question & answers can also be downloaded as revision notes all on the blog.

This a project that’s currently in the making.

The official site is here: http://radcareapp.tumblr.com/ 

I’m trying to design an app as a patient resource to help give more and clearer and even better information to help the patient have better understanding of their treatment, the side-effects, what to expect, how to get to the hospital, what the treatment room looks like, some questions they can think to ask, support groups, supportive care links and numbers, ect.

In stage 2 of the app development, it will be interactive used to monitor the patient: They can have a treatment diary, take photos of their side-effects or other things, can use to highlight if they think they need help, and it will ask the patient a series of questions on how they’re feeling, how they’re coping with side-effects, with all things such as financial, psychological, social, sexual, and will include support for carers too.

A small group of friends, Kim Bamford, Karen Gurney, Charlotte Hunting, Courtenay Marsh & me (Sarah Smizz), created and organized the successful RAD Conference. A conference dedicated to everything Radiotherapy and Oncology aimed at students, service users and professionals.

I created the branding and wrote our mission. We have reached healthcare professionals across the globe. Our aim was to create a conference to share stories, experiences, research and practices to inspire and debate.

For more information please visit our website, or follow us on twitter!