Public Health – Is a step change in early diagnosis possible?

Sara Hiom – Cancer Research UK Back to top

Sara Hiom is director of information at Cancer Research UK.

There are three key issues needed to improve early diagnosis of cancer:

• Knowing which areas we need to focus on international benchmarking would help Britain to understand where it can do better
• Measuring the impact effectively - increased awareness or increased number of people going into primary care
• Capturing best practice - the work of the National Cancer Intelligence Network in improving data staging is essential and much needed. We need to robustly evaluate and be honest about impact, and then share this data.

Professor Alan White - Leeds Metropolitan University Back to top

Alan White works at the Centre for Men's Health at Leeds Metropolitan University.

• More men are dying of cancers that are not male specific so are men a hard to reach group?
• The answer is in public health messages targeting the places that men are, rather than expecting men to find the information themselves (i.e. in the workplace, football grounds).
• Public health should seek out captive audiences to drive messages

View the presentation in Dropbox|.