Public awareness and early diagnosis

It is estimated that millions of people in England are living with undiagnosed diseases.  As part of the Living Longer Lives programme, we work to improve public awareness of the signs and symptoms of serious illness and disease so people can get diagnosed and treated as quickly as possible.

What we do

There is a huge opportunity for the NHS to prevent people from dying too soon by diagnosing conditions as early as possible and getting them the treatment they need before the condition worsens.  Our programme of work in this are focuses primarily on:

• Supporting campaigns to increase public and professional awareness of diseases like cancer, which could be prevented or treated earlier to improve outcomes, eg the Be Clear on Cancer campaign
• Enabling GPs and primary care staff to proactively seek out those people who are living with unidentified illnesses which could be amenable to treatment by using innovative case-finding and risk assessment tools and techniques, eg the Guidance on Risk Assessment and Stroke Prevention (GRASP) suite of tools.
• Exploring mechanisms to facilitate early, easy and equitable access to diagnostic tests.

Why we do it

Treatments offered earlier on in the disease processes commonly results in improved outcomes.

Increased public awareness and greater access to diagnostics supports early diagnosis. Early diagnosis allows treatments to be offered sooner.