29
Jan 2020
Shortage of NHS staff means over 1,100 bowel cancer patients diagnosed too late each year
Cancer Research UK say that thousands of people with bowel cancer in England are ‘slipping through the net’ each year and being diagnosed too late due to a lack of NHS staff who specialise in conducting colonoscopy tests.
Colonoscopies locate pre-cancerous growths in the bowel. A referral in England is harder to access than in Scotland because the criteria threshold is higher, meaning many patients fail to receive an early diagnosis, reducing the odds for survival drastically as a result.
The majority of people diagnosed with bowel cancer are over the age of 60, the NHS therefore run a screening programme for patients over this age. The screening test, known as FIT, searchers for hidden blood in the stool, called haemoglobin, which can be an early symptom of bowel cancer.
If the test finds anything unusual, further tests may be carried out to confirm or rule out cancer. Each individual health system decides the level of haemoglobin which warrants referral for further tests.
This, Cancer Research UK say, is the stage where patients are missing out on potentially life-saving diagnoses, mostly due to a lack of specialist staff.
Whilst the NHS in England say stools must contain 120 micrograms of haemoglobin per gram of faeces, the threshold in Scotland is 80 micrograms of haemoglobin per gram.
The charity have calculated that if the NHS in England changed to the same referral threshold, there would be an additional 2,000 colonoscopies in England each month, 24,000 a year.
Cancer Research UK’s director of early diagnosis Sara Hiom, said “The UK’s bowel cancer screening programme is very effective at detecting cancer early.
“But we’re concerned that NHS staff shortages are having a direct impact on the ability to diagnose more patients at an early stage – something that the Government committed to doing last year.
“People shouldn’t be slipping through the net. Improvements to cancer screening in the UK need to be made quickly and safely to ensure the NHS can diagnose people earlier.”
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Posted by Tony May, Partner/head of Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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