In Campaign News, Charity News, Uncategorized

brainstrust has won a £1,000 Movement for Good award thanks to nominations from the public

brainstrust was nominated to win a £1,000 boost as part of specialist insurer Ecclesiastical’s Movement for Good awards, which is giving £1million to charities this summer.

This £1,000 will go towards producing more of our information standard accredited resources for people living with a brain tumour and their loved ones. Our resources include a Fatigue Resource, Patient Guides, Proton Beam Therapy Guides and more.

“Our brain box was very welcome, I have enjoyed the book, and there is a lot of useful info in the file. We have had to smile at the pink brain stress ball, my hubby used it to show our grandchildren (aged 4 and 7) where grandad’s brain is poorly. The four year old likes to show everyone now and tells with great authority what each part of the brain does!!”

Caregiver, Midlands

“Just to say how good I think the Fatigue book is.  Very professional which is unusual to find in these sorts of publications.  Some very good pointers and easy to read and sensible and well designed. I would recommend it to non-brain-tumour people too.”

Patient

Members of the public were invited to nominate causes close to their hearts, with 500 gifts of £1,000 available for donation. brainstrust was one more than 7,000 charities which were nominated by an amazing 98,000 members of the public to be in for a chance to win a financial boost.

What it means for the people we support

Tom Cowie, Head of Income at brainstrust, says:

“We are so grateful to everyone who took the time to nominate brainstrust and share the appeal on social media. It is thanks to these wonderful people that we’ve received £1,000 to go directly towards supporting people living with a brain tumour and their loved ones. Our resources are more than just a source of information, they are a source of empowerment for people affected by this terrifying disease to live the life they want following diagnosis. It means so much to us and the people that we support that we have received this contribution towards the production of more resources for our community.”

About Ecclesiastical

Mark Hews, group chief executive at Ecclesiastical, said:  “As a company whose purpose is to contribute to the greater good of society, charitable giving is at the heart of our business. We know that £1,000 can make a huge difference to the incredible work that charities do and we’re looking forward to seeing how this financial boost will change lives for the better.”

  1. Owned by a registered charity, Allchurches Trust, Ecclesiastical is a specialist insurer of the faith, heritage, fine art, charities, education and private client sectors
  2. Ecclesiastical is one of the UK’s top five company givers to charity according to the 2017-18 UK Guide to Company Giving. After donating £50m to charity in three years, Ecclesiastical launched a bold vision in 2016 to raise £100m for good causes by the end of 2020. In August 2018, the Group announced it had already raised £50million towards its target. Find out more at ecclesiastical.com/ourstory

About the Movement for Good awards

  1. Ecclesiastical has launched a new £1million giving programme, called the Movement for Good awards which will help charities change lives for the better. 500 charities will receive £1,000 and 10 charities will receive £50,000 aimed at supporting innovation in the sector
  2. The £1,000 awards launch on 23 April and is open to all UK-registered charities. The £50,000 awards are open to all UK-registered charities with an income of less than £5m, which support the advancement of education and skills; citizenship or community development; arts, culture or heritage. For more information visit ecclesiastical.com/movement-for-good
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Introduction

The Brain Tumour Data Dashboard lets you explore up -to-date, population level data about the brain tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2015. Using the drop down menus on the left you can select different groups of patients to view in the charts below. In these charts the number of patients for every 100 diagnoses is displayed as images of people. Patients have been grouped by date of diagnosis, type of tumour, age, gender, and region in England.

For each group of patients you can explore the different routes to diagnosis, the proportion of those who received chemotherapy or radiotherapy, as well as the survival of the patients within each group. For more information about what these metrics mean please see the glossary.

How to use

  1. Select the year of diagnosis using the drop down menu.
  2. Select your patient group of interest from the four drop down menus in the following order:
    1. Tumour group
    2. Age at diagnosis
    3. Region of England
    4. Gender of patient
  3. To view a second chart to compare different groups of patients, click the ‘compare’ button.The second chart will appear below the first chart.

*Note that the tool is best used on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile phone*

Unavailable data

Some of the data in these charts is not available.There are two main reasons for this:

  1. How the data has been grouped

If you cannot select a patient group from the drop down menus, the data is unavailable because of how the data has been organised.

Public Health England has grouped the data like a branching tree. The bottom of the tree contains all the patients with brain tumours, and then each branch divides the data by a certain characteristics, like age, or location of tumour. But the data is divided in an order, starting with location of the tumour (endocrine or brain), then by age, region, and gender. Age is at the start because it makes a bigger difference to survival rates and treatment rates than gender or region. Sometimes, after the data has been split by type of tumour and age, there is not enough data to be split again. This is because to protect patient confidentiality groups cannot contain less than 100 patients. Because some groups cannot be split further, you cannot create ‘totals’ for everyone by region or gender. For example, you cannot see results for all ages by region, or all brain tumours by gender. If these totals were calculated and released, it might be possible to identify patients, which is why Public Health England cannot release this data.

  1. Statistical reasons and data availability

If you can select a patient group from the chart menus, but the chart does not display, the data is unavailable for one of several reasons:

  1. Data is not yet available for the selected year from Public Health England.
  2. Data is not available because the data quality is too poor to release this statistic.
  3. Data is not available as the statistic is not appropriate for this group.
  4. Data is not available because the standard error of the estimate was greater than 20% and so the estimate has been supressed.

Up to date brain tumour data

Brain tumour data may influence the decisions you make about your care. Data also helps you understand the bigger picture, or landscape, in which you find yourself.

Brain tumour data and statistics influence the focus, and work of organisations like brainstrust. The information helps us to understand the scale and impact of the problems we are setting out to solve.

This tool helps you understand the landscape in which you find yourself having been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This landscape can be particularly tricky to navigate as there are many different types of brain tumour, all of which have a different impact.

The information you see represents the most up-to-date, official, population level brain tumour data available for England. Over time we will be adding to the brain tumour data available and publishing reports, with recommendations, as a result of what we learn from this data.

The data behind this content has come from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and is a direct result of the ‘Get Data Out’ project.

This project provides anonymised population level brain tumour data for public use in the form of standard output tables, accessible here: http://cancerdata.nhs.uk/standardoutput

Incidence

The number or rate (per head of population) of new cases of a disease diagnosed in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of cases divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Malignant

Malignant tumours which grow by invasion into surrounding tissues and have the ability to metastasise to distant sites

Mortality

The number or rate (per head of population) of deaths in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of deaths divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Non-malignant

Not cancerousNon-malignant tumours may grow larger but do not spread to other parts of the body.

Survival

The length of time from the date of diagnosis for a disease, such as cancer, that patients diagnosed with the disease are still alive. In a clinical trial, measuring the survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works. Also called ‘overall survival’ or ‘OS’.

Routes to Diagnosis

Under the ‘Routes to Diagnosis’ tab in the Brain Tumour Data Dashboard, you can explore the ways patients have been diagnosed with brain tumours. There are many ways, or routes, for cancers to be diagnosed in the NHS. A ‘route to diagnosis’ is the series of events between a patient and the healthcare system that leads to a diagnosis of cancer. The routes include:

  1. Two Week Wait

Patients are urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer via the Two Week Wait system and are seen by a specialist within 2 weeks where they are diagnosed.

  1. GP referral

Diagnosis via a GP referral includes routine and urgent referrals where the patient was not referred under the Two Week Wait system.

  1. Emergency Presentation

Cancers can be diagnosed via emergency situations such as via A&E, emergency GP referral, emergency transfer or emergency admission.

  1. Outpatient

Outpatient cancer diagnoses include diagnoses via an elective route which started with an outpatient appointment that is either a self-referral or consultant to consultant referral. (It does not include those under the Two Week Wait referral system).

  1. Inpatient elective

Diagnosis via an inpatient elective route is where diagnosis occurs after the patient has been admitted into secondary care from a waiting list, or where the admission is booked or planned.

  1. Death Certificate Only

Diagnoses made by Death Certificate Only are made where there is no more information about the cancer diagnosis other than the cancer related death notifications. The date of diagnosis is the same as that of the date of death.

  1. Unknown

For some patients with a cancer diagnosis, there is no relevant data available to understand the route to diagnosis.

 

More information

If any of the statistical terms in this section of the brainstrust website are hard to understand, we recommend looking them up here:

Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Statistics Explained

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/cancer-stats-explained/statistics-terminology-explained#heading-Seven

If you are looking for help understanding terms relating specifically to brain tumours, and treatment, then the brainstrust glossary is available here:

https://www.brainstrust.org.uk/advice-glossary.php