A Blackburn GP practice is leading the way after setting up a bowel cancer clinic to trial a new hand-held endoscopic device to spot cancer.

Shifa Surgery has set up the clinic using the LumenEye which could change bowel cancer pathways in the UK forever by enhancing early detection of disease and reducing costs of unnecessary investigations into benign disease.

The hand-held device gives a high-definition view of the lower gastrointestinal tract without the need for extensive bowel prep or sedation.

It has the potential to give GPs better risk stratification tools whilst reducing costs of unnecessary secondary care referrals for benign disease

In the UK as many as 4 in 10 people at any one time are experiencing symptoms of digestive disorder and up to 20 per cent of GP patients will have experienced rectal bleeding within the past year

Currently, FIT testing, which detects the presence of blood in stool samples, is the main way of triaging patients for hospital referral.

Diagnosing bowel cancer early is extremely important as the survival rate is as high as 90 per cent, but as low as 10 per cent when diagnosed at stage 4.

The new hand-held endoscopy device and software can be set up in the doctor’s office, operated by a single doctor and comfortably used without sedation or overnight bowel prep with oral laxatives.

The LumenEye was invented by Fareed Iqbal, a former British Colorectal Surgeon with over 10 years’ experience of treating colorectal cancer patients.

He said: “A major objective of the NHS long term plan is to prevent the negative sequelae of serious bowel diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and improve the early detection of bowel cancer, but this currently relies heavily on appropriate triage and referral to colonoscopy– with over 900,000 performed annually in the UK.”