John Baron MP attends Melanoma Dashboard launch

John with Gill Nuttall (l) and Pauline Latham OBE MP (r),

MP says low public awareness must improve

John Baron MP recently attended the Parliamentary launch of Melanoma UK and the Melanoma Dashboard. The Melanoma Dashboard is a new online tool which brings together information, enabling patients to find their local melanoma services and compare how services in their area perform against the rest of the country.

John was given specific melanoma data available for Basildon and Billericay. It is one of the top ten cancers in the UK for both men and women and, over the last 25 years, rates of melanoma have risen faster than any of the other cancers in this group.

There is a wide range of existing data about melanoma in England but this data is often accessible from a number of different sources. Melanoma UK and Bristol-Myers Squibb developed the Melanoma Dashboard to bring together a number of existing data sets in one user-friendly web comparison tool.
John said,

“The low public awareness of melanoma continues to be a problem, and more needs to be done to ensure patients, the public and health professionals receive the right information about the disease to access the support they require and improve outcomes.”

“One of the best ways of improving outcomes is to focus on earlier diagnosis, as late diagnosis makes for poor survival rates. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer has campaigned on this issue, and we were very pleased the Government and NHS England responded by placing one-year cancer survival at the top of the local NHS accountability tree. This should quite literally save thousands of lives.”

Gill Nuttall, Founder of Melanoma UK said:

“In creating the Melanoma Dashboard, we hope that patients and the public will be better equipped with information about melanoma, specialist care services and support in their area. By highlighting variation in incidence and mortality, it is also an essential way of showing where further work is needed and where services can be improved.”