Prostate cancer - awareness workshop

Coping Through Football runs a targeted health and wellbeing programme as part of its delivery to users with mental health problems. We are aware that many mental health users experience poor physical health and may have a limited engagement with primary care services and services that support their physical health and so in March we invited Prostate Cancer UK to speak to the group.

The session was led by Errol McKellar, a 56 year old car mechanic who owns a garage in Hackney. He is often to be seen on TV, and heard on the radio campaigning for better awareness of the disease. Errol openly and honestly told his story. He was first diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 when his wife urged him to go to see his GP after being fed up with his snoring. Errol shared the startling statistics that 1 in 8 men, but 1 in 4 Black men, will be diagnosed with the disease. Currently more men are dying from prostate cancer each year than women are from breast cancer. He explained only men have the prostate gland so it is a ‘male only disease’ and is the third most common cancer to die from after lung and bowel cancer.

Inviting questions from the audience, Errol was able to de-mystify the information about the disease, from what is the prostate, where you find it, to signs and symptoms of the disease. He outlined his work raising awareness and campaigning for routine screening in men. Errol explained that prostate cancer is most common men in over 50, with a higher risk if there is a family history of the disease.

Currently there is no national screening programme for men. Whilst women in the audience were able to confirm that they routinely attended NHS screening programmes for breast cancer and cervical cancer, few men in the audience were able to confirm that they routinely attended their GP.

Errol’s key message was for men to ‘go and get yourself checked out’ especially if you are over 50. Although women remain the main ‘gatekeepers’ for men’s health, men need to take more ownership and better responsibility for their own health. They have a right to be checked and tested, and they owe it to themselves and to others to raise awareness among their friends, families and communities.

Errol has organised a Fundraising Match at Leyton Orient FC on Sunday 27th May, Big Cause Errol’s Celebrity XI v Martin Ling’s London Legends.