Breast Cancer Surgery Priority Setting Partnership
The ABS and James Lind Alliance are working together to establish a Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) following the methods set out by the James Lind Alliance. The JLA is a non-profit-making initiative that brings patients, carers and clinicians together in PSPs. These partnerships identify and prioritise uncertainties about a particular condition or treatment that are agreed to be the most important “unanswered questions” in the specialty, and the aim of this is to ensure that the bodies who fund health research are aware of the questions that are felt to really matter to both patients and clinicians. Answering these questions through research could help with the progression of medical knowledge and benefit patients.
This partnership will expand on the ABS Gap Analysis and involves patients, carers, charities, healthcare professionals and researchers to find out what is important in breast cancer surgical research. The ABS have agreed to fund the PSP, supporting key staff and resources to ensure that the PSP will be successful.
Breast Cancer Surgery Top Ten Priorities
To identify and prioritise research gaps in breast cancer surgery, the ABS has recently supported a James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership exercise. This has allowed us to develop a list of Top 10 research priorities, which have been agreed by breast cancer patients, women at high risk of breast cancer and a broad range of healthcare professionals. Over the coming months we will be seeking to develop research questions to address these priorities and move forward breast cancer care to benefit current and future patients
The Top Ten research priorities were presented at the recent ABS Conference in Liverpool, and can be found on the webpage [link], along with further information about how this work was carried out.
If you have ideas that would answer these questions the Academic and Research Committee would love to hear from you!
View a summary of the JLA Priority Setting Partnership process
Breast Cancer Research & Treatment
The JLA PSP process and outcomes have now been fully described and peer reviewed, and have been published in Breast Cancer Research & Treatment.
