The big idea
The Christie is a tertiary Specialist Cancer Centre in Greater Manchester serving a local population of 3.2 million, with a quarter of our total referrals coming from other parts of the UK. Approximately 1,200 prostate cancer patients are treated at The Christie each year, with aftercare generating more than 5,000 hospital based follow ups annually.
The follow up these men receive has been mainly traditionally delivered through a medical model involving Consultant or Specialist Nurse out-patient appointments and associated monitoring tests. With no defined follow-up pathways for men who have had prostate cancer treatment, patients often returned for hospital follow-up for many years, despite the NICE guidelines recommending follow-up ‘outside the hospital environment’ two years after treatment.
With increasing diagnosis and survival rates for men with prostate cancer, there is now an increasing pressure on hospital outpatient departments to provide follow-up care. The work of the cancer survivorship initiative has also demonstrated that there is a growing demand for more individualised cancer aftercare services, with feedback from patients telling us that they continue to have unmet needs at the end of their treatment.