United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust has launched a new Breast Pain Clinic to support people across the Lincolnshire area.
The new specialist service, introduced as a collaboration between the trust and NHS Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group, will provide a full family history assessment, breast examination and expert advice to patients suffering from breast pain.
According to the trust, the clinic will offer a ‘a different way’ of looking at healthcare in its provision of hospital services from secondary care within a community-based primary care setting.
Previously, people suffering from breast pain would be placed on the two week wait cancer pathway, but the new service aims to ‘improve’ outcomes for patients by reducing the wait cancer referrals by 15 to 20%.
Chris Chantry, Deputy General Manager in the Family Health Division at ULHT said: “Healthcare is always changing through innovations in treatment or research and sometimes the way we deliver care can make the biggest difference to patients. This collaborative approach between Lincolnshire’s hospitals and GPs in communities helps patients to be seen just as quickly as they would have been previously, but in local settings.
“Currently there are clinics running in Lincoln and Boston. If, as we expect, these clinics prove successful they may be expanded to other areas and the Trust may also look at what other pathways and services could work well in this new approach.”
Dr Amtul Sami, Breast Surgeon, commented on the new service: “Any changes in the breast, including pain can be really worrying, but breast pain alone is rarely a symptom of cancer. By setting up breast pain clinics in the community we are able to put our patients at ease and offer them help and advice whilst checking family history and conducting breast examinations.
“In this specialist environment we deliver the right service to the people of Lincolnshire, who may have been suffering in silence.”
