Page 8 - Inspire

With lung cancer referral rates plummeting and thousands of
people missing out on a potentially life saving diagnosis,
we knew we had to take action.

But this couldn’t be your average awareness campaign.
To cut through the noise of Covid and overcome the obvious
similarities in symptoms, we needed something extraordinary,
something that would help bring lung cancer out of the shadows…

“We knew we couldn’t wait until November – lung cancer
awareness month – to launch the campaign,” explains the
charity’s Marketing Director, Rachel Avery. “The situation was
far too dire to be bound by dates.”

With people reluctant and scared to go to their doctor, even with
serious symptoms, cancer referral rates had dropped significantly.
During the first peak of the pandemic, lung cancer referral rates
were down 75%.

Lung cancer faced the additional hurdle that the cough – one of
its most common symptoms – was now overtly linked to Covid,
which only added to the confusion.

For years, we have been told ‘If you have a cough for three weeks or
more, go to your GP’. During the first lockdown, those with a cough
were being told to do the complete opposite – stay at home.

Back then, Covid tests were not readily available. If you had a
cough, you isolated. You had no way of knowing whether that cough
was Covid or lung cancer or something else entirely. If it was lung
cancer, it would continue to go undiagnosed and untreated. So the
decision was made to accelerate and extend the campaign,
launching in September and running right through into December.