Lancaster Medical School has submitted evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee's inquiry exploring innovations in cancer diagnosis and treatment.
The Future Cancer inquiry will look at the innovations with the greatest potential to transform cancer diagnosis and treatment for patients and how these can be translated into frontline clinical settings.
The written evidence was submitted by an interdisciplinary research team conducting a study called "Prehabilitation for Cancer Surgery: Quality and Inequality" (PARITY), funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
The study is led by Dr Cliff Shelton and the project team includes Dr Lisa Ashmore, Dr Laura Wareing, Dr Yasemin Hirst, Professor Andrew Smith, Dr Chris Gaffney, Mrs Andrea Partridge, and Professor Jo Rycroft-Malone.
Prehabilitation is the practice of improving a patient's fitness before they undergo a major healthcare intervention, with the aim of improving their outcomes. It often focuses on physical activity, diet, and psychological support and it has become an accepted part of the cancer surgery pathway, offering an innovative approach to reducing the length of hospital stays, inequalities and improved treatment options for patients who receive a late-stage cancer diagnosis.
Whilst many NHS organisations offer prehabilitation, services vary widely between providers.
The PARITY Study is researching the quality of prehabilitation provision across the UK and has identified low awareness of prehabilitation in cancer care even though there is support for healthier lifestyles and improving cancer diagnosis outcomes.
The team has worked with groups of both patients and clinicians to co-design a set of criteria for prehabilitation provision that sets out what is important to stakeholders.
Dr Cliff Shelton said: "The criteria are factors that the patients and healthcare professionals feel are most important, such as emotional health, exercise, nutrition, community support, access to information and equality and inclusion. Personalised care has emerged as a common theme in our research. As a result, we aim to build further knowledge about how prehabilitation services can meet patients' individual needs, for example by taking account of their backgrounds and capabilities. This will allow us to understand the principles for best practice, which can be transformed into clinical implementation guidance."
The Future Cancer inquiry builds on the Committee's recent work on cancer services, including its report in April 2022, which was focused largely on current provision of cancer services and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
