New life-saving cancer screening ready to go
Thursday 21st October 2010, 2:30PM BST.
Recent appointments at the Medical Specialist Group have overcome a shortage of expert staff.
MAJOR steps towards preventing dozens of deaths from cancer every year have been taken, the Guernsey Press can reveal exclusively today.
Two key moves towards introducing bowel cancer screening in the island have happened, leaving it in the hands of deputies next Wednesday whether the service goes ahead.
A lack of expert staff had prevented screening before – but appointments at the Medical Specialist Group have overcome that.
And Health and Social Services has agreed to back a new method of screening, which is more effective than that previously planned when funding was approved in 2007 by Treasury and Resources.
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I’m not opposed to introducing this screening, but I think the decision should be based on correct information, and I’m still somewhat dubious about the figures being used for numbers of lives which can be saved. The article mentions ‘dozens’ of lives potentially saved per year by sigmoidoscopy testing, and the full Press article says twenty lives could be saved per year using FOB testing.
Who did the Press get these figures from? And what data sets or research are they based on?
See also my original post on this: http://www.thisisguernsey.com/2010/10/07/people-have-died-due-to-lack-of-testing/#comment-78496
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You can influence how you are by what you eat. A different and proactive way of considering what you might be prone too, rather than wait for someone else to put in place screening programs that are about finding it once it starts, rather than looking at not getting it started in the first place.
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I am sorry Guern abroad but I cannot agree with your prognosis,as much as I agree I do believe you can help prevent illnesses by the diet you have I dont think that is as cut and dried as it seems.
How many people have gone on to have lung cancer and never smoked in their lives.
I know of quite a few people who have had bowel cancer and their diets were very good and one was tee total.
I say the more screening for every illness going the better.
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Cannot agree with you Guern abroad
Many people do not know what common sense eating is. Blame this on education, about the only convenience food when I was young was Smiths Crisps!
Now 2 problems arise, golden(wonder)oldies who due to excellent health care are getting older and have to expire from something!
And 2 generations of parents who are too busy to cook real food, let alone teach their children how to.
So today’s children may die early (obesity or abuse related diseases) and will never grow old enough to be screened
Schools is where the influence has to start for common sense skills including cooking, healthy living etc. Maybe this should have equal priority with Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic.
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I’m afraid I can’t agree there Guern.
I had bowel cancer 6 years ago, a major operation with 4′ of intestine removed, followed by 18 weeks of highest doses of Chemo and I have never felt 100% since, though I am alive.
Everyone knows that early detection is critical in this disease (as in any admittedly) – when my tumor was firrst discovered, it was 5″, by the time I had my op it was 8″ (3 months later).
I was advised by my oncologist that normally the cancer cells re-generate at an average of 33%, mine were re-generating at in excess of 90%.
I’m not after sympathy, I am just trying to point out the benefits of early detection, and if screening is introduced, it can be found if a person has the possibility of developing the disease rather than when it has developed.
If it is a choice between bowel cancer screening or museum storage, I know where my vote goes.
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Glad to read of your current situation and that you pulled through what was I expect a challening time.
I do agree with screening being an important part of health programs, as you do need processes in place to help spot issues in populations where there is concern of health diseases being present.
Diet does play a vital role in health from what I have been reading. When we say good diet people often mean home made and perhaps not so much chocolate etc. but it rarely means no animal protien. If you want to find out more about the affects of diet and Western diseases then have a read of The China Study to get you started.
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It baffles me that the HSSD could not find the relatively indignificant costs of this from within their £100m plus budget. They should be told to do this, full stop.
By the way, it doesn’t save lives, it prolongs them.
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There’s currently an argument going on about whether £250k earmarked for Culture and Leisure to use for storing artifacts should be diverted to HSSD for bowel cancer screening.
Both are very worthy causes.
If Mr Wong had paid his dues, then maybe the money would be there for both?
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No Cher Eugene you are wrong, if you want such a graphic explanation here goes, a sigmoidoscopy can see polyps that are benign growths that can turn into cancer later on so lives can be saved,and people have polys removed all the time to prevent them turning cancerous.
After looking after both parents with cancer I would welcome cancer screening of any type before storing a few old books, I am sorry but unless you have witnessed the process of someone with terminal cancer a process that you would not put an animal through, think very carefully. I am not saying that any other illness is equally distressing but I do agree Health should be having all the money they need and not be having rob Peter to pay Paul.
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Avoiding red meat appears to be key, together with eating plenty of fruit and veg and regular moderate exercise. Screening everyone from a certain age is also very important. Scandinavian countries are way ahead of us on this one. Early detection is crucial.
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Tay Korway
I see you are also signed in as Gloria Sweather
Are you also by any chance Betty Swollocks?
No problem… just wondering
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valeite,
A few comments ago you said ‘I say the more screening for every illness going the better.’ But it isn’t that simple.
Screening programmes are not without their own negative effects, even if they save lives overall: Screening programmes may produce false positives – many of the people who have a positive result will actually turn out not to have the disease, and they may go through a great deal of anxiety and stress in the process of getting a final diagnosis. The screening process may itself may also carry some risk. I encourage to you read this article if you want more detail:
http://www.badscience.net/2008/01/screen-test/
After we’ve considered the negative impacts of the programme, we have to look at the potential benefits. This involves multiple large controlled trials, the results of which then have to be analysed by other experts in the field to decide how well they were done, and how significant the results are.
We then have to decide if it’s worth the cost. A screening programme which costs £1m p/a may be worth it if it saves 20 lives a year, but not if it only saves 1 life every ten years. Somewhere in the middle there has to be a cut-off point where we say a screening programme is too expensive to justify.
The problem with the amendment being brought to the States is that it takes a complex clinical decision out of the hands of the people who manage HSSD’s budget, and puts it into the hands of Deputies.
Given that, as we’ve already seen, neither Deputy Hadley nor the Press is capable of crunching the statistics without getting in a mess, I think having the States directly prioritising HSSD’s budget, without HSSD first producing referenced research justifying their priority recommendations, is a risky road to go down.
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Ray
Not a name I’ve used nor an affliction I could have.
I do enjoy a Ciao Main Though :-)
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Yes I take your point Chris J but try telling that to the breast cancer ladies who go for screening and have to have many tests to go through often going to the mainland just to see if the lump/ mass or whatever, is cancerous, it maybe very stressfuk waiting for the results and going for all these scans etc but to me it is worth every test in the world.
I do not agree at all that if the test has turned out to be false positive, you have gone through all that stress, wouldnt you prefer to be told it was a wrong result you do not have cancer?
Yes I do agree we cannot possibly screen for every illness going, I do understand it is far more complex than that, also the cost and staffing come into it in a small island like this. But if the staff and equipment is here and by the looks of it the consultants, lets get going and bring this screening on.
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valeite,
I think you are missing the point I was trying to make, which is that screening programmes have negative effects besides the cost, and these need to be balanced against the positive effects. For example, if a patient gets a false positive result, then the subsequent negative diagnosis may indeed come as an enormous relief, but in the meantime the patient experiences what may be the worst time of their life. This is a negative outcome of the screening programme, because without the programme, the patient would never have gone through this experience.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t have bowel cancer screening – in fact I think it’s quite likely that we should. What I’m saying is that HSSD should be in charge of prioritising it as part of their budget, and the States should not set themselves up in the business of deciding whether individual clinical interventions are worth the cost.
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Well I cannot believe the voting today 23 to 21 against bowel screening, what are these deputies thinking.And as for the deputy that said people should pay for the privilege what a joke, there are people in Guernsey who cannot afford to go to the doctor let alone pay for screening.
It is about time that some of these deputies thought about everyone in Guernsey not only the well off, I fully agree with Matt Le Tissier about the proffessional footballers having the I’m alright jack attitude and unfortunately some of our politicians are the same, some just simply don’t understand the logic of it all.
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Valeite
Perhaps the deputies were swayed by the first rate winding-up by Deputy O’Hara set against the waffle, rant and bumble from Deputies Fallaise and Hunter Adam. The HSSD already spends some £1,600 per annum for every man, woman & child on the Island; surely they could find £3 per head to cover this service. Scrap the anti-tobacco campaign for example!
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Valeite
I believe what the States voted against was using another departments’ budget for this. As quite rightly they voted against Mary Lowes amenment for use of some of these funds. I’m sure Health can manage to squeeze £250k from somewhere in thier budget. If not then perhaps they could look at someone else’s budget to obtain this £250k.
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