Dr Alison Birtle:
Hello, I'm Alison Birtle and I'm an Oncologist based at the Rosemere Cancer Centre at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals Trust in Preston.
It's really important as clinicians and healthcare professionals that we know about patients who've been treated for cancer, about their long-term quality of life, and this is because cancer really, now, we've got so many different treatments for many patients that we can do, to try and keep their quality of life as good as possible, for as long as possible, and that means that cancer often becomes a bit like a chronic other illness, a bit like arthritis or diabetes, because we can try and keep people as well as possible for a long period of time.
But, the problem is when people come to clinics, sometimes we don't always ask the right questions, and that's why it's very important to me to know the results from the cancer survey looking at quality of life, and this is going out at the moment, and it would be so important to me to learn from my patients what matters to them on a daily basis, what changes their life from one day to the next, and that's why it's really important to try and complete this survey.
