Bowel Cancer Screening
Watch Professor Brian Saunders, Director of Bowel Cancer Screening, give a brief overview of bowel cancer screening services at St Mark's Hospital.
Professor Siwan Thomas-Gibson, Deputy Director for Bowel Cancer Screening, talks about the benefits of screening and a new, simpler home-test kit called 'FIT' - Faecal Immunochemical Test.
Screening Services Provided by the Bowel Cancer Screening Centre
FIT Postal Screening: a quick and easy Bowel Cancer detection test for everyone aged 56 to 74 that is sent every two years which you return in the post.
Bowel Cancer
Bowel cancer is the UK’s fourth most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths. More than 41,000 people are diagnosed and nearly 16,000 die from bowel cancer each year.
Also known as colorectal cancer, bowel cancer refers to tumours in the part of your gut called the large intestine or large bowel.
Most people who get bowel cancer are aged over 60. We test for polyps between the ages of 60-74. By detecting and removing polyps before they can become cancerous we can reduce your risk of getting bowel cancer by half.
Your appointment is important
If your FIT kit test is positive you will be invited to attend a Specialist Screening Practitioner assessment. This assessment will be face to face
Your appointment will be carried out at St Mark’s, Northwick Park Hospital, Watford Road, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 3UJ. It is five minutes from the Northwick Park tube station on the Metropolitan Line.
For parking and directions by Road, Rail and Bus, please see our Parking and Directions page, below.
The bowel screening centre strives to reduce inequalities in access to its services for our local population. It does this my monitoring uptake and conducting audits of who is and who isn’t coming for screening and uses this information to conduct research to inform its health promotion work to improve screening uptake for everyone and particularly those population groups who may face additional barriers in accessing the service. To review our publications list and some of the conferences we have been presenting our findings at, click the link below.