The Lung Cancer team at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre have won a national award in partnership with Roche for their work demonstrating the benefits of giving patients an immunotherapy treatment subcutaneously (injected under the skin) instead of intravenously.
They won the Best Contribution to Improving the Efficiency of NHS Services Award at the HSJ Partnership Awards which took place in London on Thursday 19 March. The team had also been shortlisted in the ‘Best Pharmaceutical Partnership with the NHS’ category.
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre was one of the first hospitals in the North West to roll out the subcutaneous version of the immunotherapy treatment for lung cancer, benefiting patients and the NHS by reducing treatment time while maintaining quality.
The collaboration with Roche is the first real-world study of its kind and used time-stamped data to show that giving the treatment by injection under the skin significantly reduced the time each patient spends on chemotherapy treatment units by an average of 54 minutes each time. It is also far more efficient for hospitals, meaning more patients can be treated and there is less drug wastage.
It was the use of real-world data to validate and evidence the benefits of administering the treatment subcutaneously that has been so pioneering about the team's work in collaboration with Roche and this was what really stood out to the judging panel. They have proved that patients stay on the unit for around 40 minutes for the subcutaneous treatment compared with around 90 minutes when they receive it intravenously.
Patients have also found it more convenient to have subcutaneous treatment as it means they spend less time in hospital. The time saved also means the NHS benefits from increased capacity and the change has also reduced wastage.
Hala Ghoz, Advanced Clinical Practitioner in Lung Cancer, said:
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre is a national leader in immunotherapy treatment innovation and we quickly recognised the potential benefits of subcutaneous options for our patients and for the NHS as a whole.
We started work on this two years ago and it has been a really brilliant team collaboration with Roche. Working together in this way enabled us to use our data to demonstrate the real-world benefits and validate the impact of the change we made.
Our award was the last of the night and when they said we had won, I just couldn't believe it. It feels incredible to have the judges of a national award recognise our work in this way. I am so proud to work in a team like this.
Consultant Medical Oncologist Dr Jonny Heseltine, who specialises in treating lung cancer, said:
This project shows the huge potential of using real-world data to inform how we can deliver patient care most effectively, improving patient experience and making services really efficient. The dataset for this project was huge and complex so it required a close collaboration between our clinical team and the data scientists at Roche to achieve our aims. This was truly a team effort and we are delighted at the impact it has had.
Lung Cancer Advanced Nurse Practitioner Sarah Rose said:
We know that our patients really value spending less time in hospital, and we hope that by adopting these new treatment methods that we can make life easier and less complicated for them.
In addition to winning the award for improving efficiency, the Lung Cancer team were also shortlisted in the 'Best Pharmaceutical Partnership' category of the HSJ Partnership Awards.
Our Metastatic Breast Cancer team and Novartis were shortlisted in the same category for their pioneering work supporting patients with treatment-related toxicities (side-effects).
