Belfast. Yes, Belfast. Just the sort of venue you’d usually find an excuse to avoid if you are asked to give a session at the National Cancer Intelligence Network national conference. But you’d have been wrong to avoid it. Of course, I come biased, having been born within a mile of the conference venue, and gone to school a few hundred yards away. Belfast is lovely. The city always had some majesty – having been really wealthy in the 19th and early 20th century, before industrial decline set in, let alone the Troubles. But, hey, money – and peace – has really worked.
The NCIN matters. It’s the biggest conference of all the cancer number-crunchers. And we have lots of numbers to crunch in cancer. Its one gap has been in primary care – and rumour has it that previous meetings have had an undercurrent of low-level bleating that ‘the cancer problem is really the GP’s fault’. So, I was asked to go and lecture to disprove – or was it to prove – that point. I can’t tell you how well the lecture was received (though I was given a shamrock tie and a bottle of whiskey) but I can tell you I was mistaken for Sir Richard Peto, the amazing epidemiologist who knows everything about smoking. I must put it on my CV…..
Willie Hamilton, Professor of Primary Care Diagnostics, UEMS