Lung cancer is the UK's biggest cancer killer. It kills 36,000 people every year - more than breast, prostate and pancreatic cancer combined. It is a disease that can affect anyone - men and women, young and old, smokers and non-smokers.

One of the main reasons for the low survival rate is because lung cancer is detected too late and people are diagnosed at late stage when curative treatment is not an option. 

This needs to change and we know how to make it happen - by rolling out a national lung health check programme.

When a person is diagnosed at an early stage, they have up to a 73% chance of surviving for five years or more. The current five-year survival rate for lung cancer is just 10%.

Problem is, lung cancer is crafty. People who have lung cancer can be asymptomatic for a long time and often symptoms only start to appear when the cancer is at an advanced stage.

So we need to be smarter. A national lung health check will make us smarter. It will allow people to be diagnosed with lung cancer at an earlier stage. We know this, because we are already seeing exactly that in pilot programmes, including our own check in Nottingham.

Lung health checks are therefore an excellent first step in improving lung cancer survival rates and give us and people affected by lung cancer real hope for change.

For too long people with lung cancer have been ignored and forgotten. Now it time to make lung cancer a priority, to address this shocking statistics attached to this awful disease and help the people who it affects - the mums and dads, the sons and daughters, the grandparents, great grandparents, friends and colleagues. These people matter. Now we need to show just how much... #LetsRoll