Anne Lanceley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Women’s Cancer, UCL EGA Institute for Women’s Health. She is a trained nurse and works clinically at University College London Hospital delivering psychotherapeutic interventions to patients with cancer. Anne’s research interests lie in interventions for improved recovery after cancer treatment, quality of life, and the implementation and evaluation of innovative psychological therapies in the clinical setting.

Anne’s research has a strong practice focus and her initial work originated in her experiences of the emotional life of cancer patients and nurses on wards where she worked. Her thesis – The nurse and patient in emotion talk in cancer: ‘The tempest in my mind’ – looked at the processes of talk between nurses and cancer patients and examined the impact on the nurse of hearing patients’ feelings and distress. More recent conversation analytic work has examined how end-of-life talk is initiated in a brief therapy designed for advanced cancer patients. Other studies have looked at the therapeutic potential of heritage-object focused work with cancer patients. Work revealed that patients ‘used’ museum objects effectively in sessions to explore their feelings of family, identity, loss and mortality with nurses skilled in communication. Anne is currently developing these ideas and is examining in more detail the mechanisms of heritage-object focused work with patients to inform the design of a manualised treatment for use in cancer care. How objects may act as resources for wellbeing and recovery in cancer care is a primary interest. Ideas concerned with the interconnectedness of critical heritage and wellbeing and identifying the diverse ‘object worlds’ encountered by individuals undergoing cancer treatment are current preoccupations.
In addition to ongoing projects with a therapy focus she is also working on studies concerning consent to treatment and the socio-cultural and ethical implications of novel treatments, for example targeted molecular therapeutics in women’s cancers.

Anne leads the Patient Care Research Group in the Dept of Women’s Cancer at UCL and lectures on MSc programmes in Women’s Health and Cancer Medicine and Society. She is a Scientist of the Global Institute of Psychosocial, Palliative and End of Life Care, University of Toronto, Canada, and a Fellow of the European Academy of Nursing Science.