Submitted by Catherine Atkins on Thu, 11/07/2024 - 14:23
Congratulations to Elspeth Davies, CRUK Alliance for Early Detection (ACED) funded PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology who has had a paper published in The British Medical Journal of Medical Ethics. The fascinating paper explains some of the findings of the four years of Elspeth’s PhD research which focused on patients’ experience of the capsule sponge test from social scientific perspectives.
The paper explores some of the social and ethical questions that surround the potential implementation of the capsule sponge test in the NHS. Highlighting that patients’ hopes for the test were not always the same as researchers’, it asks who gets to define the aims of screening tests? The article also considers the care that is provided to people after they undergo the capsule sponge test, especially for those who are diagnosed with Barrett’s oesophagus, a risk state or precancer for oesophageal cancer. As a result, these patients can experience worry and anxiety and might require particular specialist care that is currently not provided on the NHS.