NHS Research: Cancer awareness research

The Department of Health launched the Cancer Reform Strategy which outlined actions to improve UK wide cancer services within the NHS.

A key component of this work highlighted the importance of raising awareness of cancer within the general population. To aid this, the generic Cancer Awareness Measure (CAM) was developed and extensively validated to assess members of the public’s awareness of the symptoms of cancer and the length of time respondents would wait before contacting a doctor to discuss these symptoms, in addition to awareness of the causes, types and incidence of cancer and awareness of the NHS cancer screening programmes.

Subsequently, site specific cancer awareness measures have been developed to assess awareness of bowel, lung, breast, ovarian and cervical cancer specifically and our public sector division, Public Knowledge, our public sector specialist division, was commissioned by NHS Hartlepool to collect data using these site specific measures, specifically the bowel and lung measures on behalf.

We believe that this research is of paramount importance in helping the NHS to improve levels of cancer awareness, ultimately raising regional levels of cancer survival in the long term. Having now conducted 16 projects using the CAM, comprising data collection from over 23,000 respondents, Public Knowledge are experts in this field and we are keen to continue the good work.

“We commissioned Public Knowledge to carry out our cancer awareness survey across County Durham and Darlington. They achieved this relatively large face-to-face survey across a large geographical area within a very tight time scale. I was very impressed by their professionalism and standard of the reports they produced. We are intending to use them again in the future to re-administer our survey. An excellent service.”

Want to know more about how we can help you? Contact us here and a member of the team will be in touch!

Related Divisions

Related Sectors

Related Methodologies