Children's cancer charity Childhood Eye Cancer Trust (CHECT) has called on UK opticians to adopt a new protocol to prevent delays in eye cancer diagnosis.
Babies and young children face serious delays in receiving life-saving treatment because their symptoms are being missed by frontline health professionals, new figures released by CHECT to coincide with World Retinoblastoma Awareness Week (May 12-18) have shown.
Research on children diagnosed with retinoblastoma in the UK in 2012 found 72 per cent of GPs did not make an urgent referral, as recommended in the NICE guidelines. The research showed that 100 per cent of opticians who examined children who had retinoblastoma prior to diagnosis made the appropriate referral. However, CHECT chief executive Joy Felgate said some practices that chose not to examine babies and young children had sent parents away with misleading or no information at all about where to seek help and the need for an urgent examination.
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