My name is Gordon Dow, and I am Chief Executive Officer of the Throat Cancer Foundation.
I did not come into this role from a medical or charity background. My career began in accountancy and management, cutting my teeth with roles in blue-chip organisations including NCR, StorageTek, Standard Life and the NHS. Much of that time was spent in environments where systems, processes and performance mattered — particularly in global manufacturing and IT asset management. In simple terms, I have spent much of my career making sure things keep working.
That might sound far removed from throat cancer, but for me the connection is immediate. In manufacturing, you quickly learn that nothing simply “breaks” without warning. A production line does not usually go from running perfectly to complete failure overnight. There are signs. Output begins to drift. Small faults appear. Something that once ran smoothly starts to become inconsistent. Ignore those signs, and the consequences build.
In IT, it is no different. Systems slow down. Equipment becomes unreliable. Errors begin to appear. If you wait until a system crashes, you are no longer managing the situation — you are reacting to it. The organisations that perform best are not the ones that fix things fastest after they fail. They are the ones that prevent failure in the first place. They monitor. They maintain. They act early.
That mindset has stayed with me throughout my career, and it is one of the reasons the work of the Throat Cancer Foundation matters so deeply to me.
When I became involved with the Foundation, I was stepping into an organisation shaped by the vision and determination of its late founder, Jamie Rae. Jamie’s own throat cancer was linked to HPV. Like many people of his generation, he was never given the chance to understand that risk early enough. The information, awareness and protection that exists today simply was not there for him at the time.
He understood very clearly that what happened to him might have been different if prevention, education and awareness had been in place earlier. That realisation helped drive him to establish the Throat Cancer Foundation — not simply to support people after diagnosis, but to stop more people ever reaching that point in the first place.
That is where Jamie’s vision and my own background connect.
Throat cancer, like many serious conditions, often develops over time. It can give warning signs: a persistent sore throat, changes in voice, difficulty swallowing, a lump in the neck, or symptoms that simply do not go away. These are signals that something may not be right.
Yet too often, people wait. They assume it is nothing. They carry on with life and hope it resolves on its own. Sometimes it does. But sometimes it does not. And that is where the real risk lies.
In every professional environment I have worked in, ignoring repeated warning signs would be seen as poor judgement. In some cases, it would be considered negligent. Yet when it comes to our own health, many of us do exactly that. We wait for failure.
From my perspective, early diagnosis is not just a medical concept. It is a practical, real-world principle. The earlier you identify a serious issue, the more options you have. The longer you leave it, the more complex, difficult and damaging the situation can become.
That is why the Throat Cancer Foundation’s message is so clear: Prevention where we can. Early diagnosis where we can’t.
This is not a side message for us. It is central to who we are and what we are here to do. Prevention means helping people understand the risks, including smoking, alcohol and HPV. It means continuing to talk about the importance of vaccination. It means making sure people have access to clear, trusted information before they are sitting in a consulting room facing a diagnosis.
Early diagnosis means helping people recognise symptoms and giving them the confidence to act, because action changes outcomes. If something in your throat, voice or neck does not feel right and lasts for more than three weeks, get it checked. That is not overreacting. That is not wasting anyone’s time. That is exactly how every well-run system in the world is managed: you notice the signal, investigate the cause, and act before the damage becomes harder to repair.
I have spent a career helping organisations avoid failure by acting early. At the Throat Cancer Foundation, the principle is the same — but the stakes are far higher. Because when it comes to throat cancer, early intervention does not just protect performance, efficiency or output.
It protects lives.
