Alumni newsletter - June 2024
This page contains all the content from the this months alumni newsletter.
Welcome to our new Clinical Champions!
Everyone is excited to welcome the newest cohort of Clinical Champions. It’s a privilege to be running this transformational programme for a fourth consecutive year and recruiting such passionate, motivated clinicians to drive change across the prostate cancer pathway. We wish you a warm welcome!
Meet our new Clinical Champions!
Alumni event returns!
Next years theme is 'Thriving Through Change'. Our (free) alumni event will be back on Friday 9 May 2025 at a venue TBC.
Research funding opportunities!
As part of our investment in prostate cancer research, our Research Team have been working with the Medical Research Council. Together we will jointly fund Clinical Research Training Fellowships which give people with a clinical background (including allied health professionals) the opportunity to undertake a PhD or re-acquire research skills. These grants cover salary and project costs for up to three years and the next call has just opened! Otherwise they'll be reopening in October 2024 and February 2025.
We are also partnering with the Academy of Medical Sciences to fund Starter Grants for Clinical Lecturers. These grants provide up to £30,000 for up to two years to cover the cost of research consumables, allowing research-active Clinical Lecturers to gather data to strengthen their bids for longer-term fellowships and funding. The next round will open in July.
You can read more about all our available research funding opportunities on the website. We’re keen to make the most of these great opportunities so please share with your networks. If you’d like to speak to a member of the Research Team, please get in touch with them.
Writing a business case for the NHS.
Implementing a change project could be due to a gap in services, or it could be an opportunity that has yet to be explored.
Your business case is where you outline what your proposed change / project will look like and what it aims to do to rectify the problem or explore the opportunity further. Below you can find a framework and some tips that may help you in writing yours.
This is a simplified reiteration of the information contained in your business case. It’s sometimes easier to do this when you’ve written the rest.
This is your opportunity to create a compelling argument for the change or project you are proposing. It needs to explain how the new system/service will work, and more importantly why it is the best route. You’ll need to be sure that you know who this business case is for, who is reading it and making the decisions? Tailoring this to your audience involves adapting the argument to what they will find most important or persuasive.
- Describe the current service/system
- WHY is the change needed?
- The solution – clearly articulate your vision for change
The last section should answer the question: How will you know your change is working? What metrics or milestones will you be using to prove the effectiveness of your project?
Does it align with your organisation’s strategic goals, national NHS requirements, QOF or PCN DES requirements, or CQC recommendations?
- Costs
- Timescales – start date, first milestones etc.
- Required skills and resources.
- Procurement and contractual obligations
- The risks of NOT doing it
- Who your project team is.
- Are there alternative options?
- The impact on patients, services, and the organisation: will this project make cost savings, make more appointments available, reduce admissions for minor issues or waiting times for appointments, follow up or diagnosis, and will it provide improved outcomes for your patients?
Make sure to provide any evidence, whether statistics or case studies that will support your case. Make sure these are accurate and will stand up to scrutiny.
Our work in active surveillance
We’ve been working hard to support everyone associated with active surveillance, both men and clinicians. We’ve been looking at active surveillance best practice protocols from Trusts across the country and we recently had our Active Surveillance Programme where we helped clinicians support thousands of men. However, our work is not done.
We know there are some great examples where active surveillance is wholly supporting men. We want to learn from you and share with other clinicians who are looking to implement these changes. We're in the process of building a toolkit to support NHS stakeholders on the implementation of stratified pathways, and we'll aim to share this soon.
In the meantime, it would be great to hear some of your experiences, the challenges you faced when implementing active surveillance stratified follow-up and how you overcame them. Contact the team with your experience.
The STRATCANS (STRATified CANcer Surveillance) model, for example, demonstrates resource savings (fewer clinical appointments and MRI scans), freeing up capacity to manage men at higher risk and high patient compliance rates, as well as reducing overtreatment in men with a lower risk of disease progression.
This area of work is a core deliverable for Cancer Alliances, set out by the NHS Cancer Programme. As identified in the current Cancer Alliance Planning Pack, NHS England is asking Cancer Alliances to implement projects using risk stratification tools to reduce unnecessary biopsies and progression to other treatments.
For further information and resources check out our Active Surveillance Hub.
