Development and validation of a blood cancer awareness measure
Start date
01 February 2021End date
31 January 2023Overview
Cancer Awareness Measures help to monitor public awareness of cancer and can help us understand barriers and enablers to seeking medical help. Despite challenges with diagnosing blood cancers early, they’ve received less attention than other cancers. In response, Blood Cancer UK funded work to develop and validate a blood cancer awareness measure (Blood-CAM).
Aims and objectives
- To develop and validate a blood-specific version of the Cancer Awareness Measure (Blood-CAM)
- To assess the level of blood cancer symptom awareness in the general population using the Blood-CAM
- To explore the association between patient factors (e.g. patient empowerment) and outcomes of the Blood-CAM, including blood cancer awareness and barriers to medical help-seeking.
Funding amount
£78,000
Funder
Team
Research team
Professor Katriina Whitaker
Professor of Psychology and Lead for Cancer Care - School of Health Sciences, University of Surrey
Biography
Katriina Whitaker is Professor of Psychology in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey and co-leads the Cancer Care group with Rob Kerrison. Katriina's own programme of work focuses on early diagnosis and cancer, with a particular interest in healthcare-seeking and health inequalities. Katriina is a Chartered Psychologist and was made a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in 2017. Katriina is an expert review panel member for Cancer Research UK's Early Diagnosis & Detection Trials, Behavioural Health System and Health Economics research panel.
Dr Georgia Black
Reader in Applied Health Research - Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London
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Dr Jenny Harris
Lecturer in Cancer Care - School of Health Sciences, University of Surrey
Biography
Jenny is a Senior Lecturer in Cancer Care and Health Statistics the School of Health Sciences at the University of Surrey. Her on-going programme of work focuses on optimising health care delivery and outcomes based on data-driven approaches often informed by psychological and behavioural insights.
Jenny has a particular interest in psychosocial care for people living with cancer and using data driven insights to improve multidisciplinary teamworking and quality of care, patient experience and clinical outcomes.
Her recent work has been focused on the intersection of cancer and maternity care, and exploring how insights from cancer health services research might be adapted and implemented for other conditions or areas of care, notably maternity and obstetric care (TEAM-QI), peripheral artery disease and veterinary medicine.
Methodological interests include predictive risk modelling incorporating questionnaires, surveys and questionnaire design and validation, mixed-methods evaluations of complex interventions (quasi-experimental designs, feasibility studies, RCTs) and real-world implementation of electronic Patient Reported Outcome and Experience Measures. Jenny is passionate about involving patients and the public in research including studies using advanced statistical methods.
Dr Athena Ip
Research Fellow - School of Health Sciences, University of Surrey
Biography
Athena is a Chartered Psychologist working as a Research Fellow on the Together Project. She gained her undergraduate degree in Psychology and later completed an MSc in Health Psychology at the University College London. Her Master’s thesis involved a 3-arm quasi-experimental design testing the effectiveness of a positive psychology technique for its effects on wellbeing, self-efficacy, health behaviours, health values, beliefs about medicine and stress.
After qualifying, she started working in the Behavioural Science Team at Public Health England. During this time, she conducted a scoping review on the trends in theory use across the behavioural science literature and research on emergencies and outbreaks. She also conducted qualitative interviews with individuals who were deployed to West Africa during the Ebola crisis.
Athena was awarded her PhD at the University of Southampton. Her PhD was funded by NIHR and aimed to understand young people’s views and experiences of acne and its related treatments to develop a digital intervention to support self-management and assess the feasibility of this. During the final year of her PhD, Athena worked as a Senior Research Assistant at the University of Southampton which involved further research on the digital intervention developed during the PhD.
Jessica Russell
Research Fellow - Wolfson Institute of Population Health, Queen Mary University of London
See profileOutputs
Publications
Whitaker, K.L, Boswell, L., Russell, .J, Black, G.B, Harris, J. The relationship between patient enablement and help-seeking in the context of blood cancer symptoms. Psychooncology. 2023; 1- 8. https://doi.org/10.1002/pon.6170
Black, G. B., Boswell, L., Harris, J., & Whitaker, K. L. (2023) What causes delays in diagnosing blood cancers? A rapid review of the evidence. Primary Health Care Research & Development., 24, E26. doi:10.1017/S1463423623000129
Boswell. L., Harris. J., Ip. A., Russell. J., Black. G., Whitaker. K. L (2023). Assessing awareness of blood cancer symptoms and barriers to symptomatic presentation: measure development and results from a population survey in the UK. BMC Cancer 23, 633, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-023-11149-x
Resources
Blood Cancer Awareness Measure (Blood CAM)
The Blood CAM seeks to increase and monitor public awareness of blood cancer and help us understand barriers and enablers to seeking medical help.
How to access the Blood CAM
The Blood CAM is free to use but we ask you to have regard to the following conditions of their use:
- The Blood CAM is intended as an online questionnaire. It should only be administered electronically using a survey sampling company or an online survey tool.
- Do not distribute this resource to anyone else – if anyone asks for a copy please direct them to this web page so they can download them.
- If you use this resource or any part it, we would be grateful if you would please:
- Acknowledge the authorship team.
- Send copies of any reports/papers that are produced to Professor Katriina Whitaker at k.whitaker@surrey.ac.uk.
- Let us have any comments/suggestions that you feel might improve this resource so that your experience can be incorporated into subsequent updates.
Research groups and centres
Our research is supported by research groups and centres of excellence.