Charity campaigner Paul Sayer, from Southend, has launched a campaign to bring pioneering HIFU therapy to NHS hospitals in all corners of the UK in a bid to provide non-invasive treatment for prostate cancer which does not carry life altering side effects.
The Prost8 charity was founded by Paul Sayer in 2019 following his own battle with prostate cancer. This fuelled a determination to widen access to better treatment options that prevent them from suffering unnecessary life changing effects such as erectile dysfunction and incontinence.
Paul received high-intensity focused ultrasound treatment in July 2018 and marvelled at the scalpel-free treatment which involves ultrasound beams that accurately blast just the tumour cells leaving surrounding tissue and organs unharmed. He didn’t suffer any complications as a result.
Despite HIFU being approved by health chiefs more than a decade ago, just three* out of 135 NHS trusts are regularly offering it. For Paul, this is not good enough.
Further evidence emerged this year from an All-Party Parliamentary Group as they released a report on minimally invasive cancer treatments, which backs Paul’s claims that millions of men are overtreated for moderate cases of prostate cancer.
The late MP Sir David Amess was a patron of Prost8 with his successor Anna Firth (MP) equally as passionate due to the loss of her father from prostate cancer just three years ago.
Prost8 is now seeking to pressure the NHS and Dept of Health to widen access to these minimally invasive treatments (known as focal therapy). If they don’t then the charity aims to raise about £3 million to donate and deploy the first six focal therapy units into strategic hospitals across the UK to enable amenable NHS surgeons to offer prostate cancer sufferers’ free treatment which doesn’t drastically impact upon their quality of life.
With nearly one in eight men receiving a diagnosis of prostate cancer in their lifetime, Paul Sayer and Prost8 are calling on all those affected to donate anything they can in order to reach this goal. To put this into perspective, this means 500,000 men are projected to be diagnosed within the next ten years and more than a third of those men would be eligible for focal therapy instead of invasive procedures.
