Dudley Strategy for Tackling Health Inequalities 2010-15

Multi Disciplinary Teams should monitor new patients by ethnicity, age, gender,postcode and primary treatment, also stage at presentation. Use of this data throughannual equality audits should enable inequalities to be addressed at the servicelevel. This will help to identify indicators of late presentation that emerge, outcomesfollowing treatment etc. Without staging data, it is not possible to compare like forlike outcomes locally and between local services and national/internationalcomparators.To tackle the rising incidence of skin cancer the need is to reduce access to sunbeds by under 18yr olds and promote the safe sun message.Organise comprehensive social marketing/community engagement campaignsfocused on 6 key cancers lung, breast, bowel, cervical, prostate and skin; including afocus on inequalities in uptake of screening programmes. Co-ordinate activitybetween the Cancer Network and the PCT to avoid duplication and enablecollaboration and resource sharing with PCT neighbours in awareness raising and intackling barriers to screening.Ensure expansion of the breast screening programme to 47-50 and 70-73 andexpansion of bowel cancer screening programme to 75.Increased focus on cancer survivorship, for example, providing better cancer healthinformation in partnership with the voluntary sector such as supporting the MacmillanCitizens Advice Bureau serviceEnsure access to high quality end of life care and extend choice for dying cancerpatients.Review primary care urgent 2 week referrals and conversion rates (to cancerdiagnosis) to ensure best use of urgent referral route.Examine variation in primary care referral rates which may indicate populationgroups or geographic areas where there is low public awareness and/or negativebeliefs or lack of good quality primary care services.Systematically employ the Cancer Commissioning Toolkit to ensure implementationof National Improving Outcomes Guidance for all cancer sites, in particular for uppergastrointestinal cancers and specialist supportive and palliative care to ensure bestoutcomes for cancer patients in Dudley.Strengthen the role of GPs in early awareness/diagnosis of cancer and improvingscreening uptake.Address capacity issues at the local cancer unit to ensure equality of access to highquality to chemotherapy, for example, by considering community treatments.Develop sustainable mechanisms to routinely and systematically capture and usecancer data including:• Staging data• 1- and 5- year survival data with benchmarking for PCT, provider trust134