‘I didn’t even know what an MRI, CT, or PET scan was,’ says Jane Ferguson (50) from Gosport.
‘Unless you’ve had it before, you can’t request it. I would have paid for (the scans) myself if I had known that they would have told me what I know now. I would have paid thousands for that. I would have sold my house to get that. Because at that point, I had it. And they shouldn’t have just let it keep growing and growing.’
GPs are often seen as the gateway to diagnosis, and this is certainly the case with sarcoma, where they are most often the first point of contact for sarcoma patients. Sarcoma is uncommon and can present like other diseases, meaning that GPs can sometimes struggle to identify it. When GPs are unaware of its symptoms, patients are told that their symptoms are an incorrect diagnosis.
‘Everybody said it was a fibroid’, says Jane. ‘There wasn’t even a suggestion of anything else, because if there had been, I may have gone off myself and enquired or got a second opinion or ask for another scan. But no one suggested anything other than benign fibroid. All the way along they said it was not cancerous. There’s no reason to ask for anything else.’
Only a fifth of sarcomas are diagnosed after an urgent cancer referral from a GP.
Only a fifth of sarcomas are diagnosed after an urgent cancer referral from a GP.
Only a fifth of sarcomas are diagnosed after an urgent cancer referral from a GP, showing that GPs do not recognise the signs and symptoms of being that of a possible cancer. Consequently, we have worked with GatewayC, a free online cancer education platform, to develop a module to educate GPs on the signs and symptoms of sarcoma in the hope to improve early diagnosis, increase sarcoma survival, and enhance patient experience.
We’re taking action on early diagnosis.
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