Routes to diagnosis (RTD) are defined using an algorithmic approach that describe patients’ care pathways to diagnosis of cancer.
Routes to diagnosis are categorised into eight different routes, consisting of:
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- Two-week wait (TWW)
- GP referral
- Emergency presentation (EP)
- Inpatient elective
- Screening
- Other outpatient
- Unknown route
- Death certificate only
Key findings:
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- 39% of patients presented via GP referrals.
- 22.1% presented through TWW.
- 16.1% were Emergency Presentations (EP).
- 15.5% presented through other outpatient appointments.
- Patients with rhabdomyosarcoma were most likely to present acutely with 36.3% presenting as an EP.
- Phyllodes tumours were most likely to present through a TWW.
- There was an increase in patients diagnosed via the TWW pathway (22.1%, compared to 12.5% in 2006-2008¹
You can explore more of the findings in the table below, or access the full paper here.
Figure 1: Route to diagnosis for all soft tissue sarcomas (2013-2017)
Table 1: Proportion of patients by sarcoma subgroup according to routes to diagnosis (2013-2017).
*Patients under the age of 15 and over the age of 99 were excluded from analysis. For groups where there is not at least 1 patient in each ICSS age group, outputs cannot be generated.
Abbreviations: N – cohort size; LCI– Lower Confidence Interval; UCI – Upper Confidence Interval
References
- Gerrand, C., Francis, M., Dennis, N., Charman, J., Lawrence, G., Evans, T. and Grimer, R., 2015. Routes to diagnosis for sarcoma–Describing the sarcoma patient journey. European Journal of Surgical Oncology (EJSO), 41(10), pp.1393-1399.
