Hello everyone …  We hope this update finds you well and that a few of you will have found the couple of minutes needed to reach out to your MP to ask that they contact the Secretary of State for Health to initiate an urgent review in to the process by which cancer patients are given a 'no evidence of active disease' verdict.

If you haven’t yet managed to email your MP, no worries at all (we understand life is hectic) … if it helps, it really was easy to do and took a literal 2 minutes (you can find the instructions on how to do this and an email template that you could use on the previous update).

If you did, that’s awesome (*awards gold star*) we have 2 very quick follow on questions for you:

1 – Have you has a reply from them?

2 – If you have heard from them… was it a meaningful reply? Did it explicitly tell you that they were going to? Have already contacted the secretary of state for health?

If you haven’t had a reply (and if it’s been a couple of weeks since you contacted them) it could be worth sending a follow on email to them just to make sure they haven’t forgotten about you.

If you have had a reply but it didn’t 100% explicitly answer the question (will they contact the Secretary of State for Health), we would be beyond grateful if you were able to email them back with a further challenge (some ideas for which can be found below).

The campaign team have seen a few MPs replies that were not explicit instead making general references to:

• The guidance published by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in relation to when CT, MRI or PET scanning is undertaken.
• The NHS Long Term Plan (NHS LTP) specifically the section on cancer diagnosis ambitions.

In short, references to these 2 things show that they have completely missed the point of the original request (as we believe the NICE guidelines need reviewing and the NHS LTP does not explicitly call out ambitions relating to secondary cancer diagnosis).

In response to the emails from MPs that we have seen, we have worded replies to these references (included below) that you may find useful when constructing your further challenge to your MP. Our replies to references to the NICE guidelines and NHS LTP said:

1 - Given Gemma's experience (which is echoed by hundreds of people in the comments section of the petition) would it not suggest the NICE guidelines and the process by which clinical consensus is reached requires an urgent review?

2 - Given Gemma's experience (which is echoed by hundreds of people in the comments section of the petition) should the NHS LTP include some metrics around scanning of patients prior to being discharged from a cancer care process? At present none of the NHS LTP ambitions relate to any improvements in the discharge process at all (or even mention the robustness of patients being given a full body check before being given a 'no evidence of active disease' verdict), instead the diagnosis ambitions relate entirely to initial diagnosis only.

If you aren’t sure on how to approach your challenge back to your MP, you can email us at:

changeforgemma@hotmail.com

and we will do our best to come up with suggestions that work for you.

We know that making the government listen is going to take some effort ... but all positive lasting change is worth the fight.  The more people we can encourage to contact their MP, and persist until they get a meaningful response, the more questions the Secretary of State for Health will receive and the more seriously they are likely to take this problem.

Thank you so much as always for your time and support from Gemma and the team.