Lay summary
I am a general surgery SET trainee supervised by the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. My career goal is to be an academic surgeon and consultant colorectal surgeon in a public hospital.
My research objective is to determine if quantitative faecal immunochemical test (FIT), a cheap, non-invasive, accessible test that can detect minute amounts of blood in faeces, can be suitably used in the New Zealand context to triage patients with symptoms of possible bowel cancer to determine the need and urgency of further invasive colonic investigation.
We plan to pilot the use of FIT by recruiting symptomatic patients already accepted for colonoscopy to have a FIT with this result correlated to colonoscopy findings.
Potential health benefits include safely avoiding colonoscopy in very low-risk patients, identification of high-risk patients for timely colonoscopy, thereby reducing diagnostic delay, and potential reduction of overall colonoscopy demand.