As Maggie’s Dundee celebrates its 10th anniversary, Caroline Lindsay finds out more about the centre that has helped nearly 100,000 people since it first opened its doors.
Since the iconic building, designed by Guggenheim Museum architect Frank Gehry, opened on September 25 2003, it has had thousands of visitors looking to access the charity’s programme of support.
The Maggie Keswick Jencks Cancer Caring Centres Trust was founded by Maggie Keswick Jencks in 1995 to provide support for people affected by cancer, their families, carers and friends, to empower people to live with, through and beyond cancer. Maggie was a writer, a landscape designer, a painter and a mother of two who, in May 1993, was told that her breast cancer had recurred and spread to her bones, liver and brain. When asked, her oncologist gave her two to three months to live.
By joining a trial involving advanced chemotherapy Maggie extended her life by a further 18 months and it was in this time that her idea for a cancer caring centre was born. She worked closely with her oncology nurse and was asked to write an article for a medical journal on a patient’s perspective on being treated for cancer. This gave her the opportunity to work out what it was that she and the many others affected by cancer needed.
She was convinced that everybody would feel better, as she did, if they felt able to take some active role in what was happening to them.
In order not to be a “cancer victim”, she believed, you needed help with information, that would allow you to be an informed participant in your medical treatment, help with stress reducing strategies, psychological support and the opportunity to meet up and share with other people in similar circumstances in a relaxed domestic atmosphere.
She talked to her medical team at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh about a place to help their patients with the very real, if not medical, problems of living with cancer and then drew up a blueprint and plans for a pioneering venture, in a stable block in the grounds of the hospital.
Maggie died in July 1995 and the first Maggie’s Centre opened in Edinburgh in November 1996. There are now six centres in Scotland and a total of 17 worldwide.
The centres are for anyone affected by cancer places where people are welcome whenever they need support from just being diagnosed or undergoing treatment, to post-treatment, recurrence, end of life or in bereavement, so friends and family are welcomed too.
Maggie’s Centre Dundee Head Lesley Howells said: “It is simply wonderful to be celebrating our 10th birthday and to know that every year we are helping more and more people.
“At our open day yesterday we welcomed so many visitors: the Lady Provost, people we have known for years and who have used us in so many ways, and folk just coming in to the centre to use it as they would every day.
“What really made my day was the number of people visiting the centre for the first time, trying out some of our taster sessions including yoga, tai chi and creative writing.
“We are so lucky that we have very little staff turnover here; we love working here because we all know that what we do has such an impact.
“Maggie’s Dundee is undoubtedly a huge success in offering the support which people with cancer, as well as their friends and families, so badly need. That is thanks to the expert team of staff at Maggie’s but also mainly to the many volunteers, supporters and fundraisers in Dundee and the wider area who are the life and soul of everything that happens here.
“We have a birthday tree here in the centre where anyone can add their birthday hopes and wishes, and my wish is that Maggie’s will always be here for anybody and everybody who needs us in Tayside there’s a part in the Maggie’s programme that will suit you.
“The more people who talk about us and come to see us, the better you are all so, so welcome.”