Seminar 2pm - 4 pm, free networking lunch from 1 pm
You are invited to an interactive seminar about disease risk assessment, prevention and early diagnosis, focusing on initially on cancer.
As part of a national cancer project and included in Greater Manchester’s cancer strategy, a team at the University of Manchester, led by Prof Ken Muir, has been working on a new tool which you are invited to try out and feedback on.
The project is to develop and test an on-line cancer risk assessment tool. In the future (we hope) this will be widely available for the public to use either themselves or with help from either a healthcare professional or trained worker.
The on-line tool is a questionnaire where the responses are used to generate a risk score followed by advice and signposting to further help and support. There are two elements to the tool; questions about lifestyle which gives a risk score of developing cancer in the future and advice on how to reduce that risk, and questions about symptoms which gives a risk score of actually having a cancer diagnosis.
This seminar is an opportunity to hear from researchers on how the tool has been developed and is evolving as well as a chance to test out the tool yourself and feedback on how it can be improved. We are very aware of how opinions about cancer vary and how much fear persists. Our challenge is to raise awareness and knowledge to give people choices to determine their own life course and reduce disease risk, while not at the same time increasing anxiety unnecessarily.
Looking forward we are interested in how the tool would work at a community level and in widening its scope to include other diseases. Would you like to be trained as a lifestyle coach or expert patient to help people in your community improve their health and reduce their cancer risk? Or would you be interested in coming together to lobby for better food, better access to physical activity, more alcohol control, more green space, better access to healthcare or diagnostics?
Cancer is often serious, but is preventable, very treatable, often curable and well worth talking about – come and join us on the 19th December.
