Facciolo (Sict): “Promotion of lung cancer screening also in supermarkets”

“To encourage early lung diagnosis, an easily accessible and promoted screening program must be implemented throughout the country through general practitioners, pharmacies and even supermarkets.” This was said by Francesco Facciolo, president of the Italian Society of Thoracic Surgery (Sict), on the occasion of the press conference in Rome to present the new Position Paper ‘Lung cancer: the main path is early diagnosis’, created with the unconditional contribution by Johnson & Johnson MedTech.

“We must collaborate and actively involve general practitioners and pharmacies”, explains the expert. “As the Apulian experience teaches, which has organized a collaboration with pharmacies which offer the patient, via a platform, the possibility of booking a CT scan in one place, on a specific day and time”, he adds, underlining also the need for screening centers to be present in all regions.

“We need to reach civil society also through contacts with large-scale retail trade”, proposes Facciolo. “For example, you can imagine including information on screening on your supermarket receipt, writing for example: ‘if you are a smoker and over 50 you are invited to have lung cancer screening'”, he specifies. “All this involves a long-term investment, something that must be taken into account now that the new Budget is being drafted”, concludes Facciolo.