Steven Peak, delivery and development director and Steve Clayton, clinical contracts manager and authorised person (D) at Vanguard Healthcare Solutions, discuss delivering endoscopy services to meet the demands of today and the challenges of tomorrow.
Over the last 20 years, a concerted effort by staff across the health service and the wider medical community has produced improvements in endoscopy service quality, productivity, and patient experience. Services are however still encountering some challenges in planning for and meeting increased demand in a difficult period for the National Health Service; recent waiting times released by NHS England illustrate that demand for endoscopy diagnostic services is outstripping capacity,1 with no decrease in requirements anticipated in the foreseeable future.
What are the stress factors on the system?
One of the major influences on the provision of top quality, effective endoscopy services is the widely-acknowledged shift in patient demographics; not only are there more of us, but we are living longer. With cancer prevalence at its peak in the 85-89 years age group,2 increasing age is widely accepted as the main risk factor for cancer. This has led to an increase in diagnostic requirements to identify and treat pre-cancerous polyps as part of the bowel cancer screening programme, offered to patients in England aged 55; colorectal cancer in particular is a major challenge as both one of the most lethal malignancies and one that is estimated to have a total economic cost to the UK in excess of £1.5 billion as of 2009.3
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