A talking photo book on a cancer ward

Cancer services at Tameside and Glossop have started offering something that is not a scan and not a drug. A digital talking photo book: photographs, a message, a short video, and a voice the family already knows.

Tameside and Glossop NHS Charity announced the partnership this month with Featherbed Tales, a Manchester company founded by the writer Caroline M England. It is, they say, the first NHS charity and NHS trust in the country to bring the platform into cancer care. The Tameside Correspondent ran the same facts locally.

England's reason for building it is unshowy. A close friend died of a brain tumour, leaving a young son. What he had of his mother, besides the people around him, was a recording of her voice. Later, hearing another old friend's voice brought decades back in a second. BusinessCloud has the longer version, including the hill the company is named after, Featherbed Moss, above Glossop. The useful observation is smaller than a brand story. A familiar voice does a kind of work a still photograph cannot.

Steph Gooder, lead cancer nurse at the trust, put it without decoration. Cancer reaches past the person in the chair. Patients worry about how the people around them will cope. The books are a way to keep a joke, or the way someone said a name, in the sound of the person who said it. Staff will also use the same tool to explain treatments and appointments, a map of the room you are about to walk into. England has described hospitals photographing an MRI machine and recording the noise it makes, so a child can hear it at the kitchen table first.

A recording will not answer a question you think of next year. It will not keep the conversation going. Lawyers have had to find a word for the thing that will. This summer the European Law Institute approved Model Rules on Succession and Access to Digital Remains, co-designed by Dr Edina Harbinja at the University of Birmingham. They split the pile. Digital things with a price can pass through an estate in the ordinary way. Personal digital remains, tied to identity and privacy, sit under a right of access, not inheritance. In the same text, the law names deadbots: systems built to keep talking as someone who has died.

Harbinja's observation is that celebrities already sign deals for their voices after death, or fight to stop them. The rest of us have almost no map. A talking photo book on a Tameside ward is the other direction. Nobody is simulating England's friend. The boy had her.

It is one trust, funded through the NHS charity, offered through cancer services. This is not a national programme. If you are a patient there, the cancer team is the place to ask. Featherbed Tales already works with hospices and with the Motor Neurone Disease Association; the hospital partnership is the new part.