BOWEL cancer screening needs to be ‘normalised’ as early detection can save lives, a Poole specialist has said.

December is bowel cancer awareness month and Dr Sally Parry, a consultant gastroenterologist at Poole Hospital, told the Daily Echo she wants to highlight Dorset’s screening programme.

Open to everybody in the county aged 60 to 74 on a two-yearly basis, it involves using a simple kit to take a stool sample which is sent off to experts to analyse.

“It is then assessed if it has blood in it or not,” Dr Parry explains.

“If it is positive those patients then go on to have a colonoscopy within the programme.”

Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer and the second most likely to kill, with older people more likely to be affected.

However, Dr Parry says the prognosis can be much improved if it is detected early and hopes screening will one day become as regular as going for an eye test or a routine check-up at the dentist.

“In six years we have diagnosed 470 screen detected cancers in Dorset,” she adds.

“That means just cancers that have been diagnosed within the screening programme.

“These are patients without symptoms, patients who haven’t gone to their GP and who have done the kit through the screening programme.

“The great thing about the screening programme is the majority of those cancers are early stage cancers, which is a real selling point, because it is a curable disease at an early stage.”

Studies suggest the programme could result in a 16 per cent reduction of bowel cancer deaths and to compliment that, a ‘bowel scope programme’ is hoped to be introduced in Dorset this spring.

This, Dr Parry says, will be aimed at 55-year-olds and will involve a straightforward bowel scope procedure, called a flexible sigmoidoscopy.

She adds: “The message to get out is that when people get the invitation to do the kit, they should just do it – because it saves lives.”