Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
Around 1,100 people in England could miss out on the chance of an early stage bowel cancer diagnosis through screening each year because of NHS staff shortages, according to new calculations released by Cancer Research UK today.*
Bowel cancer screening tests look for hidden blood in the stool which can be an early sign of bowel cancer. But the new test, known as FIT, does not provide a simple yes or no answer.
It is up to the individual health systems to decide what level of haemoglobin - a protein found in blood - warrants further investigation, usually a colonoscopy. And this is where patients are missing out on potentially life-saving early diagnoses largely due to a lack of specialist staff.
NHS England and NHS Scotland have chosen different cut-off points for a referral following a screening test - 120 and 80 micrograms of haemoglobin per gram of faeces respectively. This means that in Scotland, the NHS refers people who have between 80 and 120 micrograms of haemoglobin, when the NHS in England does not.
https://www.dotmed.com/news/story/49949
Bowel cancer screening tests look for hidden blood in the stool which can be an early sign of bowel cancer. But the new test, known as FIT, does not provide a simple yes or no answer.
It is up to the individual health systems to decide what level of haemoglobin - a protein found in blood - warrants further investigation, usually a colonoscopy. And this is where patients are missing out on potentially life-saving early diagnoses largely due to a lack of specialist staff.
NHS England and NHS Scotland have chosen different cut-off points for a referral following a screening test - 120 and 80 micrograms of haemoglobin per gram of faeces respectively. This means that in Scotland, the NHS refers people who have between 80 and 120 micrograms of haemoglobin, when the NHS in England does not.
https://www.dotmed.com/news/story/49949