Downloads and resources

brainstrust resources are designed to help you feel more informed, in control and engaged with your care, no matter where you are on your brain tumour journey. Here you’ll find links to download our resources and request a brain box. If you’d like hard copies rather than downloadable versions, please email hello@brainstrust.org.uk

The brain box

The brainstrust brain box is a must have support toolkit for people with a new brain tumour diagnosis and their caregivers. Fully customisable, with resources relevant to your unique situation, the brain box also comes with treats like teabags and self-care items to remind you to take time to look after yourself.


Find out more and get your box

Feel confident, not confused

When you or someone you love has a brain tumour, the fabric of your life is torn apart. It can feel like chaos rules your life and you are out of control. These resources will equip you with the information you need to feel confident and in control.

The brainstrust support catalogue

The brainstrust support catalogue takes you through the various ways brainstrust can support you. It’s a great starting point to find out more about what we do and how we can help you.

Click here to download the support catalogue.

The brain tumour patient guide

The 2018 brain tumour patient guide is freely available to brain tumour patients and doctors and nurses working in relevant specialties. It explains the care you should be getting, as suggested by the latest NICE guidelines.

Find out more and download the guides

Know hows for practical advice

Having access to practical information is key to knowing what support is available. These know hows cover topics provide you with practical information and further reading to help you know your options.

Find all of our know hows here

Who’s who in your clinical team

brainstrust has developed this resource with the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, to help you navigate your journey, understanding who makes up your team and what roles they have when it comes to your treatment and care.

Download it now

My radiotherapy book

If radiotherapy is a potential treatment option for you, or you have recently had radiotherapy, then this resource will help you understand the treatment and feel more in control.

Download my radiotherapy book

Proton beam therapy (PBT) guides

These guides offer independent, factual information available on PBT and what it offers, helping you put proton beam therapy in context with respect to other treatments.

Find out more and download the PBT guides here.

Radiotherapy book for teens and young adults

Living with a brain tumour is complex. This is never more so than when you are a teenager or young adult who has been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This booklet should help you understand the range of radiotherapy treatments that are currently available and why one might be more appropriate for you over another.

Click here to download the book.

I have been diagnosed with a brain metastasis

This resource includes information for people living with a brain metastasis (secondary brain tumour). You will find information about brain mets, symptoms and treatment, as well as available support.

Click here to download the resource

Feel on top of things, not overwhelmed

A brain tumour diagnosis can make you feel as if your life is spiralling out of control. These resources will help equip you with the skills and tools to break down the overwhelm, so you can start taking control and making the decisions that are best for you.

Know Hows for taking control

These Know Hows cover a range of topics designed to help you take control of what is happening at the moment and develop strategies to help you to find a way forward.

Find all of our Know Hows here

 

My fatigue book

This resource is really important as it enables patients and caregivers living with a brain tumour to understand what is meant by fatigue and to self-manage brain cancer related fatigue.

Find out more and download here

Behaviour and personality change (BPC)

Up to 60% of people diagnosed with a brain tumour experience BPC, and until now there has little support available for this.

Click here to download the behaviour and personality change resource, and download a mood journal template here.

Feel prepared, not panicked

A brain tumour diagnosis throws you into a world of unknowns. Our resources can help you navigate the through the panic to a place where you have the information you need to take control of your brain tumour journey. The resources in this section will help you navigate through the panic and feel prepared and equipped to face the road ahead.

Know hows for treatment information

These Know Hows cover a range of topics related to brain tumour treatment to help you feel better resourced and more engaged with your clinical care, so you be confident making decisions.

Find all of our know hows here

End-of-life care

This resource has been produced with people who have the lived experience of what it is like to care for someone with a brain tumour at end-of-life, with leading consultants in palliative care and clinical nurse specialists who are hospice-based. Having as much information to hand as possible allows you to be in control, certain that you are making the right decisions for those concerned.

Find out more and access the resource.

What to expect if you are diagnosed with a suspected brain tumour

This leaflet will help you to cope with the fear and uncertainty of a suspected brain tumour. It explains what you can expect to happen next, so you can feel more informed and more in control after your scans.

Download the leaflet.

How to have a difficult conversation guide

We know how hard it is, explaining brain cancer, and having to hold those difficult conversations. This guide helps families with approaching these moments, so that you can hold better conversations and feel more in control.

Download the guide now.

We also have a resource tailored to family members who need to talk to children about their brain surgery. You can download the resource and find out how to use it here.

A guide for talking about advanced cancer

When a brain tumour recurs it is an entirely different situation from an initial diagnosis. So it is important that you have the right kinds of conversations when this happens, so that you can decide what is important to you and your loved ones.

Click here to download the Advanced Cancer Coalition’s guide to talking about advanced cancer.

Tips from a brain tumour patient’s caregiver

In this resource, a couple share their tips for when someone you love has been diagnosed with a brain tumour: including questions it’s OK to ask, the best ways to offer support, and lots more.

Download your copy here.

The Snaggle Tooth Splat

More and more parents of children with brain cancer are getting in touch to express their confusion at the diagnosis that their child has received, and also for advice on how to broach the diagnosis with their children. There is a general feeling of loss of control immediately after a diagnosis.

The Snaggle Tooth Splat  is designed to help here. The 28-page illustrated book enables parents to educate their children about what they are going through, and explains what brainstrust and clinicians are doing to help them. The book can also be used to explain to children what a newly diagnosed parent may be going through.

The book has been written by Karen Boswell, illustrated by Jason Mortimer and sponsored by Learning Curve. The foreword is by actress, brainstrust supporter and star of the brainstrust BBC Radio 4 appeal, Julie Walters CBE.

The writer Karen Boswell and the illustrator Jason Mortimer, who donated their professional services free of charge, worked closely with health care professionals from the neuro-oncology field to ensure the book met its objectives as effectively as possible. We then tested the book with nurses, parent carers, and school audiences. Both the initiative and execution have been exceptionally well received.

Read it now

Help fund our mission

These resources are driving a 20%* improvement in wellbeing for people living with a brain tumour.

Help us get these tools into the hands of more people every day with a donation of £5 each month.

*To see a full breakdown of our impact data, see our impact report.

Did this information make you feel more resourced, more confident or more in control?

Our health information is designed to help you feel better resources, more confident and more in control when you are living with a brain tumour diagnosis and it is important to make sure that the resources continue to do this. To help us make sure that the information we produce is as useful as it can be, it would be great if you could take a few minutes to complete our short feedback form.

Click here to fill out our feedback form.

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Coaching with brainstrust

Coaching with one of our support specialists can help you understand what’s important to you. We listen and ask questions, collaborating with you to create a plan to reach specific goals.

Coaching testimonial
sidebar radiotherapy

Introduction

The Brain Tumour Data Dashboard lets you explore up -to-date, population level data about the brain tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2015. Using the drop down menus on the left you can select different groups of patients to view in the charts below. In these charts the number of patients for every 100 diagnoses is displayed as images of people. Patients have been grouped by date of diagnosis, type of tumour, age, gender, and region in England.

For each group of patients you can explore the different routes to diagnosis, the proportion of those who received chemotherapy or radiotherapy, as well as the survival of the patients within each group. For more information about what these metrics mean please see the glossary.

How to use

  1. Select the year of diagnosis using the drop down menu.
  2. Select your patient group of interest from the four drop down menus in the following order:
    1. Tumour group
    2. Age at diagnosis
    3. Region of England
    4. Gender of patient
  3. To view a second chart to compare different groups of patients, click the ‘compare’ button.The second chart will appear below the first chart.

*Note that the tool is best used on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile phone*

Unavailable data

Some of the data in these charts is not available.There are two main reasons for this:

  1. How the data has been grouped

If you cannot select a patient group from the drop down menus, the data is unavailable because of how the data has been organised.

Public Health England has grouped the data like a branching tree. The bottom of the tree contains all the patients with brain tumours, and then each branch divides the data by a certain characteristics, like age, or location of tumour. But the data is divided in an order, starting with location of the tumour (endocrine or brain), then by age, region, and gender. Age is at the start because it makes a bigger difference to survival rates and treatment rates than gender or region. Sometimes, after the data has been split by type of tumour and age, there is not enough data to be split again. This is because to protect patient confidentiality groups cannot contain less than 100 patients. Because some groups cannot be split further, you cannot create ‘totals’ for everyone by region or gender. For example, you cannot see results for all ages by region, or all brain tumours by gender. If these totals were calculated and released, it might be possible to identify patients, which is why Public Health England cannot release this data.

  1. Statistical reasons and data availability

If you can select a patient group from the chart menus, but the chart does not display, the data is unavailable for one of several reasons:

  1. Data is not yet available for the selected year from Public Health England.
  2. Data is not available because the data quality is too poor to release this statistic.
  3. Data is not available as the statistic is not appropriate for this group.
  4. Data is not available because the standard error of the estimate was greater than 20% and so the estimate has been supressed.

Up to date brain tumour data

Brain tumour data may influence the decisions you make about your care. Data also helps you understand the bigger picture, or landscape, in which you find yourself.

Brain tumour data and statistics influence the focus, and work of organisations like brainstrust. The information helps us to understand the scale and impact of the problems we are setting out to solve.

This tool helps you understand the landscape in which you find yourself having been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This landscape can be particularly tricky to navigate as there are many different types of brain tumour, all of which have a different impact.

The information you see represents the most up-to-date, official, population level brain tumour data available for England. Over time we will be adding to the brain tumour data available and publishing reports, with recommendations, as a result of what we learn from this data.

The data behind this content has come from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and is a direct result of the ‘Get Data Out’ project.

This project provides anonymised population level brain tumour data for public use in the form of standard output tables, accessible here: http://cancerdata.nhs.uk/standardoutput

Incidence

The number or rate (per head of population) of new cases of a disease diagnosed in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of cases divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Malignant

Malignant tumours which grow by invasion into surrounding tissues and have the ability to metastasise to distant sites

Mortality

The number or rate (per head of population) of deaths in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of deaths divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Non-malignant

Not cancerousNon-malignant tumours may grow larger but do not spread to other parts of the body.

Survival

The length of time from the date of diagnosis for a disease, such as cancer, that patients diagnosed with the disease are still alive. In a clinical trial, measuring the survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works. Also called ‘overall survival’ or ‘OS’.

Routes to Diagnosis

Under the ‘Routes to Diagnosis’ tab in the Brain Tumour Data Dashboard, you can explore the ways patients have been diagnosed with brain tumours. There are many ways, or routes, for cancers to be diagnosed in the NHS. A ‘route to diagnosis’ is the series of events between a patient and the healthcare system that leads to a diagnosis of cancer. The routes include:

  1. Two Week Wait

Patients are urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer via the Two Week Wait system and are seen by a specialist within 2 weeks where they are diagnosed.

  1. GP referral

Diagnosis via a GP referral includes routine and urgent referrals where the patient was not referred under the Two Week Wait system.

  1. Emergency Presentation

Cancers can be diagnosed via emergency situations such as via A&E, emergency GP referral, emergency transfer or emergency admission.

  1. Outpatient

Outpatient cancer diagnoses include diagnoses via an elective route which started with an outpatient appointment that is either a self-referral or consultant to consultant referral. (It does not include those under the Two Week Wait referral system).

  1. Inpatient elective

Diagnosis via an inpatient elective route is where diagnosis occurs after the patient has been admitted into secondary care from a waiting list, or where the admission is booked or planned.

  1. Death Certificate Only

Diagnoses made by Death Certificate Only are made where there is no more information about the cancer diagnosis other than the cancer related death notifications. The date of diagnosis is the same as that of the date of death.

  1. Unknown

For some patients with a cancer diagnosis, there is no relevant data available to understand the route to diagnosis.

 

More information

If any of the statistical terms in this section of the brainstrust website are hard to understand, we recommend looking them up here:

Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Statistics Explained

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/cancer-stats-explained/statistics-terminology-explained#heading-Seven

If you are looking for help understanding terms relating specifically to brain tumours, and treatment, then the brainstrust glossary is available here:

https://www.brainstrust.org.uk/advice-glossary.php