Isle of Man

Roy Castle Lung Cancer foundation began its story on the IoM as the Lung Cancer Fund in 1991 when it was set up by Professor Ray Donnelly who was the Thoracic surgeon for the islands residents. When Ray retired, the Lung Cancer Fund was wound up on the island and was renamed the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation with the Head Office based in Liverpool.

We wanted to bring RCLCF back to the island to better support the lung cancer nurses and patients here, both via on island services and off island research and we registered as a charity on the IoM on 9th April 2019 under registration no 1277. We now have an office based at 58 Main Road Onchan which we acquired in June 2019 which officially opened in November 2019 and we have a dedicated IoM Web page https://www.roycastle.org/campaigns/isle-of-man and Facebook page - Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation in Isle of Man with our very own Manx logo that acknowledges the uniqueness of the island.

Despite the charity only being registered halfway through 2019, a lot was achieved on the Island in terms of patient support, awareness and fundraising with lots of new Charity partners onboard that were keen to help build us up further into 2020. However, just as we were gaining momentum, and about to recruit and expand operations we had to adjust quickly to the unexpected Coronavirus crisis which took the whole world by surprise. This had the effect of us having to cancel all our planned events in 2020 which meant our income literally stopped overnight, whilst the demand for our online and phone patient helplines drastically increased as our patients were having to shield from the danger of Covid 19. We have managed to maintain our patient services using emergency grants through the UK based charity but we desperately need to regain the momentum as soon as we possible can to ensure that patient support in all forms continues and to make sure that we can restart the valuable research needed to try to beat this terrible disease once and for all.