Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month 2024

The campaign highlights that when the symptoms of pancreatic cancer are missed, everything is missed. Early diagnosis, life-saving treatment, and precious moments with loved ones.

Every month, over 800 UK families experience the often unexpected and devastating loss of a loved one to pancreatic cancer.

This simply isn’t good enough.   

Every year in the UK, there are around 10,500 new pancreatic cancer cases, yet only 10% of patients are diagnosed in time for life-saving surgery.

Sadly, data shows that GPs are not spotting symptoms early enough. Despite being one of the deadliest of all common cancers, with a 5-year survival rate of less than 8%, patients will visit their GP an average of 4 times before being diagnosed. 

Early diagnosis not only matters, it is the only way to save lives. 

To address this, and in addition to encouraging the nation to check for symptoms through the #MISSEDmoments campaign, we continue to work tirelessly with our GP community to deliver specialist training and advice. 

We know the workforce is overworked and overstretched, the previous Government committed to delivering 6,000 extra GPs in England. While they failed to deliver on that commitment there is still an urgent need to grow the workforce to free up valuable time to help support GPs with diagnosis and education. 

As well as more GPs, we are asking for every UK GP to improve their knowledge of pancreatic cancer by completing our accredited GP eLearning course. We know the difficulty of identifying symptoms of pancreatic cancer which can be vague and difficult to identify even for the most experienced healthcare professionals. 

If diagnosed earlier, many pancreatic cancer sufferers could survive – but it all starts with education. For those diagnosed in time for potentially life-saving surgery, 5-year survival increases to around 30%.  This presents an opportunity for intervention where people can be diagnosed earlier and live longer with a better quality of life.