The most exciting and dramatic news of the year is that Saving Faces has collaborated with 3 national surgical specialties to create a world first! A National Centre dedicated to researching how best to prevent and treat facial and mouth diseases, injuries and disfiguring conditions. This National Facial Oral and Oculoplastic Research Centre, (NFORC) which Saving Faces (SF) funds has no equal anywhere in the world and will be studying the treatment of 2.5 million patients a year to define best treatment practice. I’d like you all to share in the excitement NFORC has generated in the surgical and research community in the UK and around the world and support it as best you can. Read more about the Centre and its first 12 month’s achievements here.

We’ve got great news about all the research Saving Faces has done. You can read more about that here.

There’s other terrific news:

• Saving Faces’ work improving UK patient care was recognized by a National Bevan Prize for Health and Wellbeing award. Our Chief Executive, Professor Iain Hutchison also received an individual award.
• Saving Faces’ work was recognized once again in a parliamentary debate – this time on domestic violence.
• Our PhD students have also been winning prizes.
• Patient demand for our national patient helpline has boomed.
• Our electronic diagnostic service to speed cancer referrals is in even greater demand by doctors and dentists.

Considering all the activity our charity does we offer great value for money and this is because so many surgeons and their staff act as researchers and data collectors free of charge. But, NFORC will increase our annual spend by £350,000 to a total of £800,000.

The additional £350,000 a year will be spent on:

• £60,000 to the NHS Information Centre for data collection and storage.
• £160,000 for additional research staff.
• £85,000 to make small ex-gratia annual payments to nursing and secretarial staff at 100 UK hospitals for their help assisting their surgeons discussing research with patients and collecting the patients data.
• £45,000 rent and overheads for offices.

So this is where you can help. All of you have been very generous to Saving Faces in the past either by donating or organizing charity events. You are one of 6,000 supporters on our database and a few of you are regular donors – two of you are incredibly generous making annual standing orders of £50,000 and £100,000 – we’d be lost without your support. I know many of you have other priorities, give to many charities or are retired and don’t earn much money. However, if all of you could see your way to making a regular donation by filling out a standing order for as little as £100 a year (the equivalent of £2 a week) it would solve this problem. If you can’t afford this how about £50 a year – that would also help. Of course, if you’d like to donate more you’re very welcome to be even more generous!!! Standing orders give us financial security and free us up to devote our attention totally to our research effort. You can set up a standing order online or download a standing order form. Don’t forget to complete the gift aid section if you pay UK tax.

Saving Faces continues to lead ground-breaking research to prevent disease and injury and find better ways of treating conditions affecting the face:

• Surgery is still the mainstay of mouth cancer treatment. Our study on early mouth cancer, the first-ever surgical study in the UK, is now nearing completion. It is half funded by Cancer Research UK and half by Saving Faces and compares two widely used, but very different, surgical techniques for dealing with these cancers. Prof Anil D’Cruz (Director of Tata Memorial Hospital in India, one of the top mouth cancer centres in the world) has been running an almost identical study at his hospital. We are both keen to combine our data to make it the most powerful study on mouth cancer that has ever been done in the world. Our results are likely to define exactly how patients with this disease should be treated.
• We are now ready to publish the results of 3 major national studies: our schools projects on the prevention of binge drinking and smoking; and our second National Facial Injury Survey studying over 8,000 facial injuries.
• We are looking to partner The British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS), The Accident and Emergency consultants and the national charity dealing with domestic violence, REFUGE, to conduct research on how best to identify sufferers of domestic violence at an early stage when intervention would prevent escalation of this violence to horrific levels. Saving Faces’ ideas have already been presented in Parliament by Lord MacColl, former Prof of Surgery at Guys Hospital, discussed in a debate on domestic violence and written up in Hansard.
• We have started talks with The Patients Association about collaboration around research to improve patient care.

We also fund PhD students and their supervisors. These are some of them and brief titles of their laboratory or psychology research:

• The genetics of precancer and cancer – Dr. Teck Teh and Dr Waseem Ahmed
• The identification and behavior of Cancer stem cells – Prof Ian MacKenzie
• Chemical messengers (cytokines) produced in cancer, their association with depression and the negative feedback of this depression on life expectancy in cancer – Jo Archer
• The psychological impact of cancer on patients’ families – Farah Shiraz
• The psychological impact of facial trauma on patients’ families – Emmy Lou Rahtz
• Pre-cancer genetics – Michael Ho
• Cancer molecular biology – Jag Dhanda

If you want to find out more detail about the results of any of these projects please contact us.