CancerWatch’s recent community engagement work arises out of our Action Against Bowel Cancer campaign and is an attempt to bring cancer prevention messages into people’s everyday lives.
The modern East End of London is a vibrant and interesting place. With a population that is remarkably diverse, it has always been an area which has welcomed successive waves of migrants from around the world, while retaining its primarily working class characteristics.
Parts of East London still have high levels of deprivation, but these days these are as often as not side by side with areas that have seen significant amounts of gentrification and are busy with young people rushing each morning to get into central London with their takeaway coffees. The old freight lines that crisscrossed the area in times gone by have now been transformed into a modernised overground metro, giving a transport system that is as good as any in the centre of London and no doubt partly accounts for the ongoing development of the area.
This is certainly true of Hackney, where CancerWatch has begun carrying out a series of community engagement events, based on its Action Against Bowel Cancer campaign which has been running for most of this year.
The focus of our community engagement work has been the link between diet and bowel cancer, with a view to giving people the information and encouragement to improve their diet and so reduce their risks of bowel cancer. As such, we’ve had a strong focus on increasing fibre in the diet. Lack of dietary fibre accounts for about 30% of the incidence of the disease, and it is considered that most people generally only consume a third of recommended daily intake of fibre in their day-to-day eating.
There are about 48,000 cases of bowel cancer each year in the UK with about 17,000 deaths. But we know that some 54% of these cases are preventable – i.e. with certain changes in lifestyle and a healthier food environment, they wouldn’t occur at all. At the same time, early diagnosis of bowel cancer benefits from an excellent and non-invasive bowel cancer screening system. And even late-stage bowel cancer, now benefits from clinical improvements in the treatment of cancer, including immunotherapy and other targeted therapies. All of this means, in theory, we could be aiming to virtually eliminate deaths from bowel cancer. But as we all know, theory is different from practice.
So, for this year’s community engagement, we put our campaign to practical effect with a number of “ten-minute talks”, short talks and interactions in coffee mornings, get-togethers and other community events usually held by the local NHS surgeries or community groups in the local area. Although billed as “ten minutes” they usually took at least three quarters of an hour to complete, and seemed to be gratefully accepted and warmly welcomed.
The talk itself consisted of background information about bowel cancer and an expression of dismay that so many people are still dying from the disease, and then demonstrating, with a number of food items as visual aids, which food groups were classed as high in fibre. Some of the attendees at those meetings were well “clued up” on the importance of dietary fibre, while others were completely mystified by it.
Nevertheless, even for those attendees who did know the importance of dietary fibre it is beneficial to remind people how much of our health is connected to food – “you are what you eat”. And in a world where food is everywhere, it still helps to reinforce what people may already know.
In the recent NHS 10 Year Health Plan, ambitions were set out. The first was to put prevention before cure, secondly to move from hospital to community and thirdly to move from analogue to digital. We believe that CancerWatch’s community engagement has made a contribution to putting prevention before cure and to moving healthcare closer to the community. Above all it has gone some way to opening the eyes of the residents of this part of London to the importance of protecting themselves from bowel cancer and reducing their risk of contracting this dreadful disease. For, as we always explain, knowledge is power.