NIHR Policy Research Unit in Cancer Awareness, Screening and Early Diagnosis: against COVID-19 ^Hub

The Policy Research Unit in Cancer Awareness, Screening and Early Diagnosis is funded by the Department of Health Policy Research Programme. The Unit has an eight-year programme to research policy issues in the three broad areas of cancer awareness, cancer screening, and early diagnosis of cancer, to inform policies for improving stage at presentation of cancer and thus reducing mortality from the disease. The Unit is a collaboration of 13 leading scientists from seven institutions, with Stephen Duffy of Queen Mary University of London as director, Rosalind Raine of University College London as deputy director and Peter Sasieni of Queen Mary University of London as vice director. The Unit partners are also involved with other national and international initiatives and bodies focussed on early diagnosis of cancer, including The International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, the National Screening Committee and the advisory committees for the breast, bowel and cervical screening programmes.

Project: 'Estimating delayed cancer diagnosis and impact on the NHS in England per week following lock-down due to COVID-19'

Research Project: Investigating the impact of changes in the NHS in response to the COVID-19 crisis on cancer diagnosis in the South West of England. The project was funded through the NIHR 'Policy Research Programme's rapid COVID-19' funding process and is supported from existing funding to Policy Research Units where projects have been adapted to address COVID-19. This research funding is part of NIHR and the Department of Health and Social Care's wider response to funding COVID-19 research.

Research Group: Cancer Group, Primary Care Unit

Aims: To model accumulating demand for primary and secondary care diagnostic tests and 2WW pathways and consequences for stage at diagnosis, emergency admissions and deaths, in order to estimate NHS capacity and diagnostics requirements as the immediate impact of COVID-19 settles into routine care.

Collaborators: This is a collaboration between the Cancer Research UK-funded CanTest Collaborative and the NIHR Cancer Policy Research Unit, led by Fiona Walter (Cambridge) and Richard Neal (Leeds). Other collaborators include Greg Rubin (Newcastle), Yoryos Lyratzopoulos (UCL), Stephen Duffy (UCL), Willie Hamilton (Exeter) and the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS).