Andrea Hunt, Matron of the Cancer Day Unit

Can you tell us more about your role and how you got involved with nursing?

I am the matron for the Cancer Day Unit and a third generation nurse; my mother was a nurse, my grandmother was a nurse and my aunt is a nurse!

I started when I was 15 at the nursing home, so I'm in my 25th year of working in healthcare.

What most excites you about Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital?

We need a new cancer hospital to obviously benefit our patients, to provide personalised medicine and increase research that is available to our patients, along with providing access to precision medicine and innovations.

We want to deliver more new treatments to our patients and learn about them — this will benefit our local community, each other, but also the wider country and beyond that.

What would a typical day look like for you?

Quite a lot of the time in our roles we're patient facing when patients are in distress or problem solving for patients.

So that can be either in the day units or on the wards when I'm working out of hours.

What are you currently working on in regards to Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital?

So my role within the project is to ready us for moving our cancer day units into the building.

We will be co-locating our two day units to one large day unit. We're very much planning how we're going to work in that area. So one day we're talking about how our nurses might rotate, another day how our patients might arrive, and then another day we'll be talking about storage and fridges.

It's very much trying to think about the space and how the space is going to work for us and then how we work with all the other elements of the cancer hospital.

How do you work with patients in development of the new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital?

We really benefit from patients joining these conversations, and it's really interesting to get their input on how they feel about arriving in the hospital or in the day unit, and incorporating that into our plans.