My name is Nick Maynard, I'm one of the consultant surgeons in the John Radcliffe Hospital, I've been here nearly 11 years, and I'm the lead clinician for the Oxford Oesophagogastric Centre.

We deal with a lot of benign disease, but also a major part of our workload is dealing with oesophageal and gastric, or stomach, cancer. Doctors, nurses and other professionals all play a vital role in treating these patients, and we discuss these patients and then together we work out the best way of treating them.

Now, as long as those tests have shown no evidence of any spread, the best treatment we can offer in this country now, in most patients, involves a combination of chemotherapy and surgery. We have developed into one of the biggest units in the country now, and regularly treat getting on for 200 patients a year with these cancers; and there's no doubt that when you're treating such a large volume of patients the survival of the cancer is much better, and there have been really dramatic improvements in survivals from these cancers over the last decade.

The outcomes from the surgery alone in hospital have improved three or fourfold in the last decade, and the long-term survival, which takes into account the surgery and the chemotherapy and the radiotherapy, has almost doubled in the last decade, so I think it's a very exciting time in this field.

The oesophageal and stomach cancers have traditionally been rather poor prognosis cancers, in which patients don't do very well, but I think latterly we're seeing big changes and I think we're going to see far more changes, and yet more improvement in survival, over the next decade or two. Again, one of the great strengths of the Cancer Centre in Oxford is the really efficient way that all the different teams work together to do their best to improve the outcome for patients.