This first round of our new grants programme was very successful and we were delighted with the range and quality of the applications.  We awarded three grants in 2017 as summarised below - these projects will complete in 2018:

Project: Understanding the Barriers in the Cystectomy Pathway and Improving Patient Experience

Shieny Abraham, Urology Cancer Nurse Specialist, Whipps Cross Hospital

This project aims to improve patient experience during their cancer journey from GP referral to cystectomy.  By conducting an audit and focus groups across the four hospitals to help us to understand the patient journey and identify real experiences. This project will also help us identify and understand some of the barriers both clinicians and patients face, to enable us to rectify or defer our practice by including service initiatives such as redesigning the pathway for invasive bladder cancer and fast track patients to prevent any delays in their cystectomies and treatment, and to help improve patient experience and patient outcomes and ensuring our service is patient centred.

Project: Identification Of New Adjunctive Treatments For Bladder Cancer

Dr Farhat Khanim, University of Birmingham, School of Biosciences

This project aims to identify and develop new treatments that can be used in combination with currently used drugs for the treatment of the early stages of bladder cancer (non-muscle-invasive bladder cancer, NMIBC).  Our work in the laboratory has already identified a number of promising treatments that we are developing towards early clinical trials. We are very grateful to ABC UK as this Improving Outcomes for Patients Programme funding will allow us to test a much larger number of possible new treatments, and will increase the chances of us progressing several new treatments towards clinical use.

Project: Assessing Patient Experience in Bladder Cancer

Snehadhar Shah, Leicester MedicalSchool, University of Leicester

The NHS periodically produces a cancer experience survey which is based on the responses of patients who have been treated.  A high level report is published from this which compares cancer site, geographical area, ethnicity, gender, tumour site and deprivation. However, the summary reports say little about each tumour site.  Bladder cancer, in particular, has a widely variable prognosis based on tumour stage, hence treatments are also widely variable due to this.  There has been no attempt to correlate patient experience with treatment type.  It is unlikely that this would be possible anywhere else in the world.  This project will offer specific insight into patient experience for patients treated with transurethral resection alone, systemic chemotherapy, radiotherapy and radicalsurgery.