Last weekend saw the annual Crawley Race For Life take place in Tilgate Park. Raising money for Cancer Research UK, this event sees hundreds of women take part in either a 5k or 10k race to raise money for the fight against cancer. Last year’s event saw almost 2,000 women raise nearly £100,000. I congratulate everyone who took part at the weekend and I was pleased to sponsor a runner who very sadly had lost a friend to cancer at far too young an age.
Cancer is a horrible illness and it is now estimated that one in three of us will have a cancer diagnosis at some point during our lives. With a statistic like that, you can see why virtually family has been affected by cancer at some point. In Crawley, there are 500 people diagnosed with cancer every year.
One reason why cancer is so prevalent is that other diseases are on the decline, meaning that life expectancy is rising so that there is more time for cancer to develop in later life. Treatment and survival rates are improving as well as information on helping to reduce the risk of some cancers, but cancer remains deadly in many cases and everyone knows treatments can have very bad side effects.
We all want to see cancer rates reduced and treatments improved and I am pleased to see that our MP Henry Smith is very active in doing what he can in parliament. Henry is Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blood Cancer and is supporting a new campaign from Cancer Research UK called Shoulder to Shoulder Against Cancer.
The campaign is to recruit more NHS Cancer staff who are urgently needed to keep up with the increasing demand for life-saving tests and treatments. This is important as one in ten NHS diagnostic posts are unfilled, and it is early diagnosis which gives the best chances of survival. This is a very worthy campaign and I hope that some of the extra £20 billion that the NHS will be receiving can be used to help tackle this shortage.
Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group
27th June 2018