Professor Glen Doherty

It's a very safe process.

Then the second thing that people worry about is the procedure itself.

And in particular, people are often worried about sedation for the procedure and whether they're going to have a general anaesthetic or whether they're going to be aware of anything during the test.

And I suppose from my own perspective, the one thing I can say is there's a lot of information actually on our hospital website, on the St Vincent's website.

We've put up some nice videos that talk through step by step each of those different processes.

So,

give you information about the bowel preparation, information about sedation, information about the procedure to try and sort of demystify the whole process.

Yeah.

So we give a combination of two medications so that patients are still able to breathe for themselves.

They're still able to talk to us during the procedure.

And in fact, sometimes we'll, in order to do a more thorough examination, we'll actually get patients to

move around, like turn on their side, turn on their belly during the course of the procedure.

And that's much easier if the sedation is at a level where they can still move themselves.

But the key thing about still being able to talk to the staff in the room is that if they feel any discomfort, if they're worried at any stage, we can talk to them all the way through the procedure, reassure them and address any problems they have.

If the preparation is good, if there are polyps there, we can usually treat those on the day.

We can remove those at the time.

And that is basically preventing those from turning into cancer in the future.

And obviously, if, as is in a small proportion of people, we identify a cancer itself, we take samples of that and we initiate then the process to get those patients referred into the system for surgery and for imaging and for, you know, to meet an oncologist if that's needed.

It depends on what's found during the colonoscopy and also then scans that are performed afterwards.

So it depends on what we call the stage of the condition.