Bowel Screening

Would you mind just saying a little bit about the pilot study and why you did one please?

Yes, when you're making decisions in health care you make them on the basis of evidence from research. And there is very good evidence that bowel cancer screening did more good than harm; very good controlled trial done by the Medical Research Council. But the team that did that controlled trial was led by a wonderful person called Jack Hardcastle, and Professor Hardcastle has spent 20 or 30 years of his life doing bowel cancer screening. His team were absolutely focused on it, they did nothing else. Now the problem that faced people like me and Julietta Patnick, the Director of Screening Programmes, was that we have to find a hundred times as many people as were in Jack Hardcastle's team, to cover the whole of England. And we know that those people, at least to start off with, are not going to be so skilled as Jack Hardcastle's team. So what we have to do is to find a part of the country where there is a very good team, and with that team, and we are sure they can deliver a good service that will do more good than harm, we will develop training resources, information systems, patient information, public information, so that when we roll out the programme across the whole of England, ensures that high quality is available across the whole of England. So, I can't, we called it a pilot, and a pilot remember is a ship that negotiates through the shoals of rocks to get you to harbour. It wasn't just a study, it was a pilot journey, we were guided by the pilot, and we are now absolutely clear that we can deliver a good service across the whole of England. So I'm very grateful to the people who ran the pilots, and I can assure the people who were looked after by the pilots, they were not part of a research project, they were working with one of the best services we could find to help us to develop the resources that the rest of England will need.