A number of different resources are available on Ardens to assist clinicians and GP practices in recognising cancer as early as possible to ensure that any 2ww referral is done in an appropriate and timely manner. Please also see the Cancer Overview support article for other cancer resources available.
NG12 Symptom & Findings Analyser
The 'NG12 Symptom & Findings Analyser' can be used to help identify if a patient's symptoms & findings match the NG12 Suspected Cancer Guidelines. This template can be accessed from the general consultation and telephone consultation templates, but please do also add it to your F12 Favourites for quick and easy access. To use this analyser, please follow the 3 steps below and also please be aware of the disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
Step 1. Record symptoms & findings on the 'Symptom & Findings' template
Step 2. Look at the view to see any recommendations based on the NG12 Guidelines
Step 3. Manage the patient accordingly
NG12 Possible Cancer Templates
The possible cancer templates are broken down for each system and then for each age group. The guidance on the template summarises the NG12 Suspected Cancer Guidelines and enables the clinician to easily review the criteria and record the patient's symptoms. The template will then advise what further management is required and enables the correct SNOMED-CT coding to be recorded, along with quick and easy access to the Cancer Referral & Safety Netting resources. Please see the Faecal Immunochemical Test support article for further information too.
Reports
Numerous reports exist to identify patients who may require a 2ww suspected cancer referral who have not yet been referred. These codes may have been entered via a numerous set of different sources, including clinician entered data during another consultation, patient entered data via online consultations or via administrative or centrally added data. These reports can be found under Clinical Reporting > Ardens > Conditions | Cancer > Alerts NG12.
Disclaimer
The 'NG12 Symptom & Findings Analyser' is purely to assist a clinician's decision making process in assessing a patient's symptoms & findings against the NG12 Suspected Cancer Guidelines. It is ultimately the responsibility of the clinician to understand and interpret the NG12 guidelines criteria themselves and to make their own clinical decision based upon all of the information that they have. Whilst the analyser may not show any recommendations, a patient MAY still need investigations or a 2ww cancer referral and clinical judgement is always required. Please note that the NG12 guidelines often mention symptoms or findings that are unexplained, recurrent or persistent. It is not possible to interpret this via the analyser so again is the clinicians responsibility to consider in the whole context of the patient.
SNOMED Codes - Specific SNOMED codes that match the exact wording for all of the NG12 symptoms do not exist. Ardens therefore have chosen the closest and most appropriate match.
Numeric codes - Common thresholds are used for findings like anaemia in the NG12 guidelines but it is also possible to record this on the 'Symptoms & Findings' template. If anaemia is not explicitly defined, then it is interpreted as either iron deficiency anaemia or non-iron deficiency anaemia.
Time period - The reports are built to look back over the last year for any of the codes above. No national guidance exists for this time frame, so Ardens have chosen this but symptoms may have been recorded prior to this which would not be identified but may be relevant.
Childhood Cancers - The NG 12 Guidelines for Childhood cancers have NOT been included as part of this analyser.
Transgender Patients - The reports and analyser is dependent upon how the patient's gender is recorded upon SystmOne and gender must therefore be taken into consideration when using this tool.