Kate Granger was a consultant geriatrician at Pinderfields Hospital, Wakefield and a campaigner for more compassion within the NHS. She was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Her mother, Mary Granger, was a city councilor; her father, Les Granger, a maths and information technology teacher. She also had a brother, Adam. She studied pharmacology and then medicine at the University of Edinburgh, graining a BSc in 2002 and her MB ChB in 2005.
After qualifying, she returned to West Yorkshire, where she worked at Pinderfields Hospital. She passed her MRCP in 2008.
She first became ill while on a family holiday to California in 2011 and was subsequently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, desmoplastic small-round-cell tumour. She had several rounds of chemotherapy, a process she described in a blog, where she also recounted the lack of compassion she found among the hospital staff who were treating her.
In 2013, she started the #hellomynameis campaign, chiefly using Twitter, with the idea of encouraging healthcare staff to introduce themselves to patients. By April 2017, the campaign’s tweets had been seen or shared 1.6 billion times, and the central idea had been endorsed by leading politicians and celebrities, and had spread outside the UK. Granger also wrote two books The other side (2012) and The bright side (2012) and raised £250,000 for the Yorkshire Cancer Centre.
In February 2014, the NHS created the Kate Granger Awards for Compassionate Care, which recognise an individual, team or organisation that has made a positive difference to patient care. In June 2014, Granger became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and in 2015 she was made an MBE.
Kate Granger died on 23 July 2016 at the age of 34 in St Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds, some five years after she had been given her terminal diagnosis. Her husband, Chris Pointon, whom she married in 2005, continues her campaign.
RCP editor
[#hellomynameis https://hellomynameis.org.uk – accessed 12 July 2018; The Telegraph 25 July 2016 www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/07/25/kate-granger-health-campaigner--obituary/ – accessed 12 July 2018; The Guardian 25 July 2016 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/25/cancer-charity-fundraiser-kate-granger-dies-aged-34 – accessed 12 July 2018; The Times 4 August 2016 www.thetimes.co.uk/article/kate-granger-vdlpflgnp – accessed 12 July 2018; BMJ 2016 354 4144 www.bmj.com/content/354/bmj.i4144 – accessed 12 July 2018]