Mr Richard Gledhill, RGN BSc Specialist Practitioner Oncology

Prostate Cancer Charity Specialist Nurse, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham

Richard Gledhill qualified as a registered general nurse from the Queen Elizabeth School of Nursing in 1992 and since qualification has worked in the urology department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
He has recently completed a degree in adult cancer care at The University of Central England.

At Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Richard progressed from staff nurse to become charge nurse on the ward in 2001, and in 2003 became the Prostate Cancer Charity specialist nurse at the hospital. At the time, this was the fourth specialist nurse post that the charity had funded nationally as part of the specialist nurse programme.

Richard is part of a team of specialist urology nurses in the department, with two colleagues on the cancer team and three colleagues on the benign (non-cancer) team. The uro-oncology team comprises three urologists and two oncologists, offers open and laparoscopic radical prostatectomy and conformal external beam radiotherapy and has recently started a brachytherapy service.

He runs a nurse-led lower urinary tract symptoms assessment clinic and a nurse-led radiotherapy 'on treat' clinic as well as pre-operative counselling and pre-brachytherapy voiding assessment services. He frequently speaks to patient groups and men (and women) in their workplace about prostate cancer and published a paper on hormone therapy for prostate cancer in 2006.

Richard is a member of the Cancer Education and Resource Team (CARE), which is a group of specialist nurses aiming to produce national standards of best practice for chemotherapy side-effect management. This work was recently published in The Nursing Times.