‘Not big shoes, different shoes’

16 October 2023

Since it was announced that Christine Cockburn would succeed Richard Vines at the helm of Rare Cancers Australia (RCA) from 1 January 2024, some quip about the large shoes Vines leaves behind and question whether anyone is big enough to fill those shoes, but ask the woman tasked with doing the job and you will find her quietly confident both in her ability to do so – and to forge new paths.

“Somebody said to me I had big shoes to fill and I thought, not big shoes, different shoes,” she says. “I have no intention of being Richard 2.0. My approach, my perspective, my vision is about picking up from where we are now and taking RCA to the next phase.”

Indeed Cockburn’s vision for the next phase of RCA is ambitious, and the honour of taking forward as a more mature entity a patient organisation that started in 2011 as a passion project of Kate and Richard Vines and which has grown into one of Australia’s most prominent and successful advocacy organisations and patient service providers is not lost on her.

“There’s so much opportunity to continue the brilliant work that was started 12 years ago and it’s a terrific gift to me professionally and a great honour to be picking up the legacy that Kate and Richard started,” she says.

“I’ve worked with Richard daily for almost six years so I’ve had a fairly intensive apprenticeship. A lot of my knowledge comes from Kate and Richard’s work in the rare cancer space, but I also have my own perspectives.

“The way I approach challenges is quite different to Richard, but he is remaining as Chair and will continue to be my mentor, just as he has been for six years.”

From carer to patient to advocate

Cockburn’s journey that led her to RCA is one of the reasons she is both perfectly suited to the role of CEO, and why she will undoubtedly put her own stamp on it.

Her mother was diagnosed with a rare gastrointestinal cancer when Christine was just 32 and died nine months later, Cockburn sharing the carer role with her sister during that time.

“It was brutal,” she recalls. “It was a physically punishing disease and something I will both never forget and which drives me in the work I do now. Nobody should ever have to go through that.”

Just three years later, the young mother of two was herself diagnosed with breast cancer but says her own journey was very different to that of her mother given her cancer was far more common, hence the treatment pathway well mapped out.

“I had nice, clear pathways that were easy to manage and access to the best possible medicines,” she says. “I had surgery and woke up one day with a Pink Lady sitting on the end of my bed who was there for me until I didn’t need her anymore.

“I had a targeted therapy that had not long been on the PBS and my oncologist was very, very excited that my amplification was able to be treated with a targeted therapy. She said it was really the kitchen sink for my diagnosis.

“As a lay person, at the time I didn’t really draw the parallel between the rare and the common because I wasn’t categorising things that way, but I did know that I was having a very, very different experience to my mum.”

After undergoing a year of treatment at her local cancer centre while completing her Bachelor’s Degree majoring in sociology and health management, the Vines just happened to walk into the centre asking for a nurse who might help them manage Kate’s growing workload. It was suggested to them that they didn’t need a nurse – they needed Christine.

“I started with Kate a few weeks later in early 2018 and have been with RCA ever since,” says Cockburn. “I was Navigator Number One.”

Appointed General Manager early last year, Cockburn says the mentorship of Richard Vines has been instrumental in both her professional growth and her success, the senior leader encouraging and supporting her through a Masters in Public Health – a remarkable achievement given she continued to both manage the growing RCA team and workload while parenting two teenagers.

While she notes the path ahead is daunting, she says Vine’s continued faith in her abilities gives her confidence that her approach is the right one for RCA.

“I’m not starting a new organisation like Richard did but meeting this organisation in a different time, in a different place, with different challenges and different opportunities, and that will very much drive the strategy from January 1,” she says.

“We have a growth strategy for the next few years. We have higher demand for our services and we know that people we look after have a better experience when they are enrolled with our model of care and our navigators, so we are going to work very, very hard to make sure more people have access to that support as it’s quite unique in the healthcare system. It fills a lot of gaps and meets a lot of unmet needs.

“But growth doesn’t necessarily mean more money or more people. It can also mean more impact and we will continue to sustain our focus on genomics for rare cancers while building deep and meaningful strategic collaborations that deliver measurable impacts.

“Of course our team will need to grow because referrals for patient requiring our support are going through the roof, but our advocacy and policy agenda is also quite ambitious and we want to have more visible impact and report on impacts that matter to patients.

“It’s a really fractious time in the Australian health care system and there’s a lot going on, so it behoves us to respond to opportunities.”

While RCA will continue to be a voice in the advocacy space, Cockburn says its focus will remain on ensuring patients with rare and less common cancers are well supported, have a smoother patient experience and better outcomes, and on “raising the tide on policy and making sure rare cancers do not slip out of the conversation”.

“We have firmly established RCA in many parts of Australian society and in data in the cancer space but our key stakeholders are patients and they still ask, how did I not know about you?,” she says. “Until we stop hearing that and until the system sees rare as a priority population, then our work is nowhere near done. This is what we do well, and what we will continue to do.”

RCA’s 2023 CanForum event is being held in Parliament House, Canberra, on Tuesday, 17 October. To watch online, register here.

©MedNews 2023