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Every year, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) runs a competition to find the cancer care team that has developed new approaches to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment. This year, six teams were shortlisted from across the UK and on the 7th October it was announced that the Oxfordshire-based SCAN pathway had won this year’s award.

Group photo of the SCAN team
Scan Team, from left to right: Zoe Kaveney (Cancer Programme Manager at OCCG), Prof Fergus Gleeson (Professor of Radiology and Department of Oncology), Dr Shelley Hayles (OCCG Clinical Director of Planned and Cancer Care), Julie-Ann Moreland (Macmillan Project Manager/SCAN Navigator) and Dr Brian Nicholson (Macmillan Lead GP and Clinical Researcher for University of Oxford). Taken in February 2020

The Suspected CANcer (SCAN) pathway is designed to accelerate cancer diagnosis in patients with non-specific cancer symptoms. The UK performs worse than many other developed nations in terms of cancer survival and this is in part due to the fact that 21% of cancers are diagnosed after emergency presentation, when they are often at a later stage and more difficult to treat successfully.

In an effort to improve these statistics, urgent referral pathways for suspected cancer have been developed for symptoms specific to one cancer site. However, one in five people diagnosed with cancer only ever report non-specific symptoms of cancer, such as unexplained weight loss, fatigue, nausea, or abdominal pain. These people often experience delays due to being referred sequentially to multiple different tumour site-specific clinics before receiving a diagnosis. The SCAN team identified this unmet need and designed and implemented a new diagnostic pathway that straddles primary and secondary care for patients with non-specific but concerning cancer symptoms.

Patients are referred by their GP to the pathway based in the Churchill Hospital, Oxford, where they are investigated with a whole body computed tomography (CT) scan and undergo blood and stool testing. The outcome of these tests directs the patient to the most appropriate clinical expertise to reach a diagnosis as quickly as possible.

The full article is available on the Cancer Research UK Oxford Centre website