Campaigning doctor who launched #hellomynameis

Kate Granger 1981-2016

An attractive, softly spoken doctor from Yorkshire, Kate Granger was on holiday in California when she developed acute back pain and began vomiting. She knew something was very amiss, and back in the UK, she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive sarcoma. “Bang out of the blue, aged 29, I had cancer,” she later said. After that, she was in and out of hospital, and as a doctor herself, was shocked by the casual brutality of medical staff who would refer to her, within earshot, as “Bed No. 7” or “the girl with cancer”. The final straw, said The Times, came when she was in a cubicle, and a junior doctor she’d never met came in, looked at her notes and – without so much as introducing himself – told her: “Your cancer has spread.”

He then walked out, leaving her in “deep psychological distress”. She complained to her husband, Chris, who urged her to “stop whingeing and do something”. So they did: having discussed various ideas, she remembered the genuine kindness of a hospital porter who had started their encounter by saying: “Hello, my name is Brian.” For once, she recalled, she’d felt treated like a person, and not an object. So she started a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #hellomynameis, calling for more compassion in care. Doctors, she said, must be careful not to lose their humanity; patients should be treated as people, not diseases. She hoped for a few retweets. In the event, the hashtag was used more than a billion times. Her campaign turned into a nationwide movement, endorsed by everyone from Kylie Minogue to the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt; more than 400,000 NHS staff signed up to it, and it was backed by countless hospital trusts. Shortly before her death, Granger received a letter from Downing Street. It began: “Dear Kate, my name is Theresa…”

Katharine Granger was born in Huddersfield in 1981, the daughter of teachers. In her school holidays, she worked in an elderly care centre. Talking to its clientele, “and realising what an amazing bunch of people they are”, fuelled an interest in what would become her medical speciality, geriatrics. After training at Edinburgh University, she moved to Wakefield, where she married Chris Pointon, a manager for Asda. Her cancer diagnosis came like a “thunderbolt”, she said. Like most people of her age, she had thought she was invincible. Instead, she found that death was rushing towards her. She went through numerous rounds of chemotherapy. Meanwhile, she wrote a blog, The Other Side & The Bright Side, and worked on a bucket list: she skydived from a height of 10,000ft, appeared as an extra on Coronation Street, qualified as a consultant, and met the Queen. Made MBE in 2015, she also wrote two books, to raise money for the Yorkshire Cancer Centre. She died at St Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds, days after reaching her fundraising target of £250,000. She was 34.