Supporting Employees Experiencing Cancer-Induced Menopause: Why Workplace Conversations Matter
For those of you in the know about monthly awareness topics, you will know October puts the spotlight on both cancer and menopause. Two very important health focused topics to consider and two topics that are often discussed within a work context. That is to say, women experiencing menopause in the workplace is a heavily discussed topic and thankfully talking about cancer and work is now also getting more attention.
But, what if you have both? You have cancer and are going through the menopause. Now, this could be because your cancer diagnosis occurred around the time of your natural menopause, but, it could be that you’re experiencing menopause because of your cancer treatments. According to a recent survey carried out by charity ‘menopause and cancer’. 99% stated that there was no pre-cancer treatment plan for the management of menopausal related symptoms and 95% didn’t feel their healthcare professionals had up to date or adequate knowledge of menopause management following cancer. These are startling concerning statistics. At a recent event hosted by the charity, I also heard testimonies from women and healthcare providers that they were considering stopping lifesaving adjuvant treatments as their quality of life is just so awful. Take a moment to reflect. Stopping something life saving because one’s quality of life is affected. It makes me think of an earlier Macmillan article ‘cured at what cost’ where we are encourage to consider the holistic impact of diagnosis and treatment on the individual. What an awful choice to have to make.
But, then I ponder: how are people integrating back into the workplace who have cancer induced menopause? Has this layer of complexity been considered? How are we helping women who have such devastating symptoms to cope with them at work? We know that work, and good work, is good for our health and logically we can hypothesis that if women aren’t enabled to consider how to manage their symptoms at work, then their quality of life could be further affected.
Helpfully, the charity provides lots of support for people and one very helpful resources is their symptom checklist. (see here for their link: https://menopauseandcancer.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Symptom-checklist.pdf) This can be used as a starting point for two conversations:
- With their healthcare provider, so that they can start to get better support and ideally resolution to some of their symptoms
- Starting a conversation with their line manager about how their symptoms ‘show up’ at work and what can be done to support them in the workplace.
At Working To Wellbeing, we provide clinical coaching that is work focused to support people to manage their symptoms when at work. We have a menopause specific service that targets the symptoms of menopause and what the individual can do to mitigate them and remain at work. We have also supported women with cancer for many years now, helping them to manage symptoms related to their diagnosis and treatment and have regularly supported women going through an early menopause. So from our experience, we know that it is possible to improve quality of life and that return to work is doable. The key, we’ve found, is to have someone championing you and your needs and helping you to create dialogues with your employers at the same time as actively managing symptoms. Both of these actions help to improve quality of life which includes being at work. If you want to find out more about the work we do and the experiences of others have been through our service, visit our Vocational Rehabilitation Coaching page here.
Written by Julie Denning, W2W Managing Director.