Almost impossible cancer spaghetti
The BMJ (British Medical Journal)
23 June 2015
This fold-out poster was included in the GP (family doctor) print edition of The BMJ. It summarises the complex cancer referral guidelines published by the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Different colours represent different referral speeds. The left column shows sets of symptoms that could indicate cancers, the middle column shows investigations to perform, and speed of referral. The circles to the right show which type of cancer to suspect, and thus which specialist to refer to.
The poster also includes a separate set of guidance for children, available by lifting the bottom half of the poster.
The children's section was actually the first part that we produced. It was a time-pressured project, with only 5 days available to transform a complex set of tables into a visualisation, which appeared in our print journal (and on the magazine cover).
The second, more complex set of guidance on adult cancers was also produced in under a week, but I was less happy with the result. Sometimes the time and resource available just doesn't match the requirements of a dataset.
Luckily, we were able to find funding from NICE to revisit this piece and produce the poster version. With extra time available, and the space of an A2 poster, I was able to reorganise the information into a more easily usable form.
I think we were able to provide a helpful guide to a notoriously complex set of guidelines. After the poster was published, we were contacted by some CCGs (clinical commissioning groups), who ordered a few hundred posters each to send to all of their GPs, which shows how useful our audience found it.
A more detailed look at the project can be found in this BMJ Opinion piece: Will Stahl-Timmins: Almost impossible cancer spaghetti
Project contribution
I created all of the different versions of this graphic and poster, using Adobe Illustrator.
