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A team led by researchers at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford is seeking to develop a new ‘Risk calculator’ that will help clinicians decide which patients should be offered further tests for cancer, based on changes in their symptoms and test results. To help us with our research, we are looking for patient and members of the public to join our team as patient and public representatives.

Our research aims to help doctors diagnose cancer sooner, so that patients can live longer, healthier lives. To make our research the best it can be, we are recruiting patients and members of the public to join our team.  

People living in the UK are often diagnosed with cancer when it is has spread to multiple parts of the body. This means it is more difficult to treat, and people are less likely to survive. To help doctors diagnose more cancers before they have spread, Cancer Research UK has funded researchers to develop new diagnostic tools.  

Our research is funded by Cancer Research UK and aims to develop a ‘Risk calculator’ that will help clinicians decide which patients should be offered further tests for cancer, based on changes in their symptoms and test results. Several risk calculators already exist, but there none that track changes in symptoms and test results. Doing so might allow a patient’s risk to be calculated with greater accuracy. 

To help us with our research, we are looking for patient and members of the public to join our team. Your role will be to help us design and carry out the research in a way that will be of most benefit to patients and the public. Specifically, you would help us: 

  • Plan and design the research 
  • Develop patient facing documents (e.g., web content, lay summaries) 
  • Monitor and disseminate progress 

The Multimodal Active Adaptive Risk Stratification for Cancer (MAARS) research team is led by researchers in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford and includes collaborators from the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford, Queen Mary University, the Manchester University Foundation Trust, the University of Surrey, and the University of West London. More information on the project can be found in materials posted by Cancer Research UK, the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford, the Oxford Centre for Early Cancer Detection, and QResearch.  

In line with Cancer Research UK policy, you will be compensated for your time (click here for further information about Cancer Research UK’s Patient and Public Involvement Policy). The time commitment is up to 16 hours over the course of the next 16 months, with no more than 3 hours anticipated in any given week. Meetings will be held during normal working hours and no meeting is anticipated to be longer than 90 minutes.  

If you are interested in acting as a patient or public representative for this project, please contact Dr Robert Kerrison at r.kerrison@surrey.ac.uk. Please include a short statement (up to 100 words) about why you are interested in being involved. We particularly encourage participation from persons from groups likely to be underrepresented in health research.  

These include but are not limited to people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, people with a disability, and LGBTQI+ people.  

We will respond to your email to arrange an informal conversation to discuss your involvement further. We will be reviewing any statements of interest on a rolling basis in April and May 2023.

Opinions expressed are those of the author/s and not of the University of Oxford. Readers' comments will be moderated - see our guidelines for further information.