David Shutts was a high-achiever - a naval commander who became a champion of British business - until he was diagnosed with cancer. Quickly he discovered employers had little use for him, and the crushing blow set him thinking about a way the talents of people with chronic illnesses could be harnessed. It began as a niggling back pain. Not enough to trouble the doctor with and easy to dismiss as wear and tear or a pulled muscle, so David Shutts ploughed on as usual, meeting the deadlines that kept coming and pursuing an active social life. But it didn't go away, and in two years the pain became constant, accompanied by unexplained weight loss and night sweats that saw him wake every morning in a pool of perspiration. "I'm a bloke," he says, explaining why it took him so long to get checked out. "I just carried on, and it was only when I was unable to operate the garden strimmer because my back was in agony that my wife lost her temper and made me go to the doctor." He was sent for CT scan and when the diagnosis finally came, 10 days after his 50th birthday, it was brutal - a cancerous tumour on the left kidney had spread to the lymph nodes, lungs and bones. It was at stage four on a scale with no more levels, incurable, inoperable and left him, in his own words, "a ticking time bomb". "You know as a 50-year-old with grade four cancer you're not going to live to 100 and that nothing is going to be the same again," he says. In fact, people with this diagnosis are not normally expected to live for more than five years, and - depending on the circumstances - possibly as little as six months.
"It turned out I had all the classic signs of kidney cancer but didn't recognise them. There's a reason why it's called the silent killer, because it's very good at hiding, hard to diagnose and tends to be found when you're looking for something else." Shutts has the confidence and energy you'd expect from a man accustomed to commanding a large team at sea. At the age of 16 he beat 1,500 applicants to land an engineering apprenticeship in the Royal Navy, then rose through the ranks to take the helm of the destroyer HMS Daring - the most advanced warship in the fleet at the time. It was his dream job, but by 2009 - at 45 years old and with an OBE to his name - he was ready for a new challenge. He took a job on land at a maritime logistics company, then moved to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), to work as a regional director. The cancer diagnosis changed everything. For six months Shutts was treated with drugs and radiotherapy that left him feeling "like a wrung-out dishcloth". When he was stable enough to return to work he negotiated a one-day-a-week arrangement with the CBI, but he had a mortgage and bills to pay, so needed more. Something flexible that he could fit around his continuing treatment and the ebbs and flows of his illness. He quickly discovered his options had shrunk dramatically - and that in fact his professional life was at an end. This proved to be the toughest setback of all. "It was the moment I really lost my mojo," he says. "I'm pretty confident and never short of word or two but my self-esteem went completely and I was at my lowest ebb. I've been a chartered engineer, I'd got an OBE for leadership and now I was none of these things, just someone with cancer pretty much ignored and on the scrapheap and feeling like there was really nowhere to go or anyone to turn to. "It was at this point that I really became aware of the true value of work and just how much it offers in terms of self-worth, self-esteem, social interaction." It wasn't just the loss of income, he missed the camaraderie of working life. His mantra had always been "work hard, play hard" and he led by example. All of that was gone. Sadness turned to anger when he thought of the millions of others who, like him, were now sitting at home with valuable skills and experiences that were going to waste, simply because they couldn't commit to full, or even part-time employment.