I’ve been away for a while, a little too busy to blog or to keep up on events. My current contract is worthy of note. Since September 2007, I’ve been working as change manager for the Colon Cancer Screening Centre project at the University of Calgary. This is a joint venture between the University’s Faculty of Medicine and the Calgary Health Region. The Centre will provide diagnostic screening for people at risk of developing colon cancer. This includes people with family history or other factors like age (if you are over 50, you are at increased risk but other factors play important roles as well), signs and symptoms like fecal blood, etc.

Colon cancer — which is not a well known disease to most Canadians — is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in Albertans. One in 14 men and one in 16 women will develop colon cancer during their lifetimes. The Canadian Cancer Society estimates that in 2006, there were 20,000 new cases of colon cancer and 8,500 deaths from the disease. 

The Centre will have the potential to screen 10,000 people this year and ramp that up to 20,000 a year in 3 years. The waiting list of over 10,000 people helped to spur the development of the Centre and with donations from charities like the Forzani and MacPhail groups coupled with other donations by Pentax (they make endoscopes as well as cameras) and the Alberta Cancer Board.

The Centre is part of a larger health information and research initiative called the Health Knowledge Hub. The HKH is designed to enable medical research across our diverse geography. This raises questions of privacy and security which have been answered by the creation of one of the most complex and secure networks in Canada and possibly North America.

Making it all work has been a challenge, but we are winning. the Colon Cancer Screening Clinic is now open and colonoscopies are being performed on an increasingly demanding schedule. To get to the magic number of 10,000 screenings this year, the Centre will have to do over 50 procedures every working day. At 30 to 45 minutes per procedure, its a daunting task, but one that the physicians, nurses, and support staff are up to. With their hard word and dedication to the task, we hope to see a reduction in the number of deaths due to colon cancer, a number that stands at 1,600 per year in Alberta.

My part of the project is winding to a close, their part is just starting and I wish them well. I’m over 50.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.