CHSPR Seminar | Linking Primary Care Records to Improve Early Cancer Diagnosis: Sharing Experience from the UK

Speaker: Meena Rafiq, University College London

The UK has established nationwide primary care electronic health record datasets that are linked to hospital and cancer registry data. These linked datasets have been used to generate influential research that underpin primary care guidelines and clinical practice in the UK. In this talk Dr Meena Rafiq will showcase how linked UK datasets have been used to research early cancer diagnosis and some of the current and future interventions informed by this research.

Dr Meena Rafiq is a GP and Principal Clinical Research Fellow at University College London (UCL) and the University of Melbourne. She has over a decade of experience in research using linked electronic health records to improve early cancer diagnosis in primary care, with a particular focus on identifying early markers of cancer using data from GP blood tests. Her research has informed updates to national and international clinical guidelines, including the Scottish Referral Guidelines (SIGN) and Australian Optimal Care Pathways. Alongside working as a GP in Australia and the UK, she has an MSc in Epidemiology, PhD in Early Cancer Diagnosis and expertise in conducting ‘big data’ research using a number of primary care datasets worldwide.