00:00 More than four out of five people would survive cancer if it was caught early enough.
00:07 So early diagnosis is really important.
00:09 If you live in Coventry, Nottingham, Basildon, Grimsby or Portsmouth, you should be on the
00:14 lookout for a double-decker NHS bus which is set to tour near your town this week.
00:19 In partnership with State Coach, the NHS bus ting tour comes as new survey data found that
00:24 two in five people would not make a GP appointment even if they spotted a possible early symptom
00:29 of cancer.
00:30 In a survey of 2,000 adults, it was found a quarter of them would just wait for the
00:34 symptom to go away.
00:36 Now Dr Hilary Jones told me a little bit more about what to expect about this bus and why
00:40 education and awareness could be the key weapon to use against cancer.
00:45 Cancer is a priority in the NHS and if we can just encourage more people to come forward,
00:50 not be frightened of a diagnosis that could be something that they fear, but to engage
00:58 with GPs, learn more about their condition and their symptoms, be more body aware and
01:04 this will make a big difference.
01:05 So it could be things like a change in your body that's been there for more than three
01:10 weeks.
01:11 So say you've had a cough for more than three weeks or a cough you've had has changed in
01:16 some way.
01:18 If you have tummy trouble, pain in the tummy or diarrhoea that's been going on for more
01:23 than three weeks, that's not normal and needs to be investigated.
01:28 Feeling particularly tired and unwell, but there's no particular reason why that should
01:32 be.
01:33 If you've had heartburn or indigestion for more than three weeks, if your emotions have
01:38 changed colour persistently, if you've got any unexplained pain or discomfort, any unexplained
01:46 lumps or bumps, bleeding from, you know, bleeding in the urine or in the motions, breathlessness,
01:53 those kind of things.
01:55 On the side of the bus, you'll find a striking message to remind people that of 78 passengers
02:00 the bus can carry, 65 would survive cancer if found at the earliest stage.
02:06 The GPs are busy, we know that, but we've actually made huge inroads into the backlog
02:11 that we had during the pandemic and we're catching up and that's great.
02:15 So we're getting there, but we do need individuals to say, yeah, I'm going to look after myself
02:21 and I'm going to go and see the GP.
02:24 Cancer Research UK's head information nurse, Martin Ledwick, said the number of people
02:28 in the UK diagnosed with cancer is set to rise by a third by 2040 and campaigns like
02:34 this can help people get diagnosed with cancer at an earlier stage when treatment is more
02:38 likely to be successful.
02:39 Oh, I think there's lots of reasons.
02:42 Yeah, it's easy to put things off, we're all busy and maybe we put other people first a
02:47 lot of the time and we think it's probably nothing, it's probably just this or that.
02:52 And if we make too many assumptions, it's not healthy.
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