📣Did you receive radiotherapy as part of your prostate cancer treatment? Our researchers need your help! 🔬
The research: Professor Rakesh Heer at Newcastle University is putting a research proposal together to identify the most clinically and cost-effective follow-up strategy for people with prostate cancer who received radiotherapy.
What they want from you: Professor Heer is looking to hold a focus group and as someone who received radical treatment for prostate cancer, they want to speak to you about your needs as a patient, your experience of follow-up care and to get your help to feed into the design of their research project.
Why it’s important: Over 25,000 patients a year in the UK undergo curative treatment for prostate cancer. For most this involves either surgery or the use of radiotherapy. Following these treatments patients get regular check-ups so that they can be managed for any side effects from surgery or radiotherapy and if the cancer was to come back it is found quickly and treated. Currently it is unclear how to best organise these check-ups with patients in different parts of the country. How patients are followed up varies by who does these check-ups, what tests are performed, how frequently check-up are performed and how many years follow-up lasts for.
Interested in getting involved? The focus group will take place in the next few weeks so contact Prof Heer (rakesh.heer@ncl.ac.uk) for more information or to sign-up by 1st December 2021.