We have been battling for some years to get this report released. The review process was an invaluable exercise in raising standards for CUP patients in England and whilst each hospital trust will have received feedback there has been no way to look at the overall picture…..until now. Following a change of leadership at QST and with the help of
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For many years CUP was covered within a sub group of the Upper GI Clinical Studies Group (CSG) of the National Cancer Research Institute. Recommendations for UK CUP research projects would be subject to peer review by the group prior to submission for funding . Towards the end of 2017 NCRI reviewed the positioning of CUP and it was removed
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Our next international conference – CUP 2019 – will take place at the Royal College of Physicians on Friday 3 May. The conference chairman will be the world-leading authority on CUP: Dr Tony Greco. The focus of the day will be on CUP research and clinical management themes in the era of precision medicine. We are on the cusp of
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The 2017 National Cancer Patient Experience Survey has been published. This relates to all cancers but is interesting in giving a snapshot of patient perception of NHS care. Key findings of the 2017 NCPES include: • For overall care the 69,072 respondents gave an average rating of 8.80 with 94% of patient giving a rating of 7 or higher. •
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The NHS has reached its 70th birthday. Fearing a declining income, an overwhelming majority of doctors opposed the NHS concept in 1948. Seventy years on, the majority of doctors resist changing the underlying principal of a free service at the point of delivery. Described by a former Chancellor of the Exchequer as ‘the nearest thing that the British have to
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Hainsworth & Greco ask some questions in their latest paper which they go on to answer: (1) Do patients with unknown primary site actually have a primary site? (2) Do CUPs mirror their counterparts that present with overt primary sites in most aspects of tumor biology, even though they differ in the ability to metastasize widely (mechanism unknown) while the
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OK, so this is not the most exciting topic we have ever covered but it is relevant! 25 May is the date that the new privacy laws come into effect (GDPR). You will have received many eMails from different organisations asking you to ‘opt-in’ otherwise the organization should not contact you again. We have eMailed all those on our ‘conferences
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CUPEM The immunotherapy trial, to which we have contributed £100,000 on behalf of our donors, is now awaiting only ethical approval. Merck are providing/funding the drugs. The trial’s initiator and lead, Dr Harpreet Wasan of Hammersmith Hospital and Imperial College London, writes: ‘We hope to recruit 77 patients in total to test the benefit of immunotherapy in CUP and hope
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The Australian authorities have been working on an equivalent to our NICE Guideline for CUP and their ‘Optimal care pathway for people with cancer of unknown primary‘ is now out in draft for public consultation in Australia. Two members of our Medical Advisory Board were members of the expert group developing the care pathway: Dr Richard Osborne and Prof Penny
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On 12 June 2018 in Bristol there is a day’s event designed for those working in CUP MDTs to come together and share experiences. Topics include: diagnostic challenges including developments in pathology, palliative care, clinical trials, developing urgent referral pathways and patient surveys. The speakers are all practitioners and this is a great opportunity to benchmark your service delivery with
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