Community Cancer Control
Community cancer control encompasses activities at the local, state, regional, or national level, which have a positive impact on the entire spectrum of prevention, early detection, effective treatment, survival, and quality of life related to cancer. Across the country, the association seeks to fulfill its mission to save lives and diminish suffering from cancer through community-based programmes aimed at reducing the risk of cancer, detecting cancer as early as possible, ensuring proper treatment, and empowering people facing cancer to cope with the disease and maintain the highest possible quality of life.
Prevention
Primary cancer prevention means taking the necessary precautions to prevent the occurrence of cancer in the first place. The association’s prevention programmes focus primarily on tobacco control, the relationship between diet and physical activity and cancer, promoting coordinated school health, and reducing the risk of blood diseases and other forms of cancer. Programmes are designed to help adults and children make health –enhancing decisions and act on them.
The association has joined other health, education, and social service agencies to promote comprehensive school health education. Comprehensive health education is a planned health education curriculum from pre-school to Grade 12. The standards describe for schools, parents, and communities how to create an instructional programme that will enable students to become healthy and capable of academic success.
The association’s school health education programmes emphasize the importance of developing good health habits and be an integral part of a comprehensive school health education curriculum.
The association promotes its cancer and blood diseases prevention message through a variety of media and education activities, as well as through different organizations. This coalition includes non-profit organizations, government agencies, Trusts, industrial establishments and corporations.
Detection and Treatment
The association also seeks, through the dissemination of its early detection guidelines and its detection education and advocacy programmes, to ensure that cancer is diagnosed at the earliest possible stage, when there is the greatest chance for successful treatment. The association works in partnership with many public and private sector organizations in diverse settings.
REFERRAL GUIDELINES
The Cancer Life Center has introduced guidelines for General Physicians (GPs) who suspect that a patient may have cancer. The guidelines help them to decide when they should refer the patient for an urgent appointment – within two weeks – with a hospital specialist. The guidelines describe what will happen if GPs thinks that the patient may have a cancer of the blood. This includes the different types of leukaemia, lymphomas (such as Hodgkin’s disease) and myeloma. Doctors may call these types of cancer haematological cancers (or haematological malignancies).
It is essential to remember that the symptoms mentioned in guidelines can have many causes other than cancer. If GP arranges an urgent appointment, it does not necessarily mean that the patient have cancer. GP may decide that the patient does not need an urgent referral now. However, he or she may still arrange for the patient to see a specialist within a few weeks or months to find the cause of the problem or get advice about treatment. In the meantime, if the patient notices a lump or any other new symptoms that last more than three weeks, the patient must inform GP about them. The GP may then decide about urgent appointment with specialist and further course of appropriate action.
