A scheme to tackle late cancer diagnosis in Greater Manchester rolled out across the North
The battle to spot cancer earlier across Greater Manchester has claimed a victory.
Greater Manchester has the UK's second highest late cancer diagnosis, we've got almost half of cancer sufferers getting signs spotted at a late stage.
Now, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester have tested a scheme which will be rolled out across the North of England to help GPs spot the signs sooner.
Known as Gateway-C, the resource has proved so successful that 73% of GP surgeries in Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire - where it was developed - have already enrolled on its courses.
Dr Catherine Heaven, who leads the Gateway-C project and is Associate Director of the School of Oncology at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, said: ‘We’re delighted to be given the go-ahead by HEE because it’s an endorsement of all the hard work our team has put into the project.
‘We’ve long acknowledged in Greater Manchester that our rates of early diagnosis must improve, and Gateway-C goes some way to achieving that.
‘We know the platform is popular: during a pilot study last year we found that 95 per cent of GPs felt it helped them with referrals. Now we hope the rest of the region will discover how valuable it can be.’
In Greater Manchester, almost 28 per cent of those patients with cancer are diagnosed in A&E departments which means that a high proportion have advanced disease when diagnosed.
Greater Manchester has the second highest level of cancers diagnosed at a late stage in England, and almost half of all lung cancer patients are diagnosed at stage IV.