This Week in Advocacy | Vol. 1
Roles, Research & Real Care
Every week, somewhere in the advocacy world, someone is quietly doing something remarkable. They’re not doing it for the spotlight, they’re doing it because patients need them, because gaps exist that someone has to fill, because they’ve lived through something hard and decided to turn that into fuel for others. That’s what This Week in Advocacy is all about. Three people. Three wins. Real work, real impact.
Let’s get into it.
Vanessa Ghigliotty, CPN — New Role, Longtime Heart
If you’ve spent any time in the GI cancer advocacy space, you already know Vanessa. She’s been showing up, at conferences, at events, in conversations that matter, for years. So when the GI Cancers Alliance announced she’s joining their team as Community Engagement Specialist, the response was less surprise and more: of course she is.
Vanessa is a 24-year colon cancer survivor. Let that sink in. Twenty-four years of living with that experience, processing it, and then turning it outward in service of others. She’s also a Certified Patient Navigator, which means she brings both the lived wisdom and the professional training to meet patients and caregivers where they actually are.
In this new role, she’ll be deepening connections to GI Cancers Alliance members, supporting patients and caregivers, and working to close the gaps in unmet needs across the global GI cancer community. That last part, closing gaps, is no small thing. The unmet needs in GI cancer are real and they’re serious, and having someone with Vanessa’s combination of survivor perspective and navigational expertise focused on that work is genuinely exciting.
Find Vanessa on LinkedIn and give her a well-deserved congratulations: linkedin.com/in/vanessa-ghigliotty-cpn-69974736/
Gretchen A. McNally, PhD, MPH, ANP-BC, AOCNP — Where Research Gets Real
Gretchen McNally has credentials that could fill a business card twice over, but what caught my attention this week wasn’t the alphabet after her name. It was the genuine joy in her voice when she talked about being included in a SWOG Cancer Research Network brainstorming session on Symptom Management and Survivorship.
“I feel so incredibly lucky,” she wrote. And I believe her.
That kind of enthusiasm about collaboration in research, the operationalization of research ideas, as she put it, is exactly what the field needs more of. It’s easy to get cynical about how slowly research moves, about the gap between a promising idea and something that actually helps a patient sitting in a waiting room. But people like Gretchen are the ones who live in that gap, who find meaning in it, and who help push ideas across the finish line.
SWOG’s Symptom Management and Survivorship work is critically important. Survivorship isn’t just about living, it’s about living well, and the symptom burden that cancer survivors carry is chronically under-addressed. Having passionate, clinically grounded advocates like Gretchen at the table for those conversations matters.
Follow her work on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gretchenannemcnally/
Rebekah Cutting — From the Ambulance to the Foundation
Some people come to patient advocacy through illness. Some come through loss. And some come through seventeen years of showing up in the hardest possible moments, like Rebekah Cutting, a paramedic with the South Australian Ambulance Service who has just joined the Ryan Bowman Legacy of Care Foundation.
Rebekah brings frontline emergency care experience that most advocates simply don’t have. She knows what it looks like when the medical system meets a human being at their most vulnerable, because she has been the person responding to that call. She’s developed what the Foundation describes as a deep passion for compassionate, patient-centred healthcare and a profound respect for dignity, comfort, and connection at the end of life.
The Ryan Bowman Legacy of Care Foundation does meaningful work at the intersection of palliative care and community support, and adding someone with Rebekah’s hands-on clinical and advocacy background to that team is a genuine asset. There’s something powerful about a paramedic who has held the space at the end of someone’s life choosing to keep doing that work — just in a different form.
Follow the Foundation’s work on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/the-ryan-bowman-legacy-of-care-foundation/
That’s your This Week in Advocacy. Three people doing the work, in three very different ways, all pointing in the same direction: toward patients, toward dignity, toward a world where no one has to navigate this alone.
If you’re not already subscribed to Advocacy at Work, this is a great moment to change that. And if you know someone who deserves to be featured here, an advocate doing something worth celebrating, send them my way. Nominate someone for next week by filling out this form, replying to this post or reaching out through advocacyatwork.com. I want to hear about the work you’re seeing in your corner of this community.