Catherine McCammon picks apart the current state of NHS cancer therapy.
Growing up, I was one of those children who naively dreamt that I could be the one to ‘cure cancer’. Flash forward several years, I’ve made it to medical school, and lecture after pre-clinical lecture is about some new drug or treatment target that will revolutionise the treatment of cancer. But that isn’t the reality of the situation, is it? After doing more research, I began to see the headlines beyond the shiny new drugs and flashy research papers. We may be beating cancer in the lab, but we certainly aren’t in the hospitals.
Our country is failing cancer patients. Only 3 trusts out of 121 in England are meeting their cancer targets. These state that hospitals should; diagnose or rule out cancer in 75% of cases within 28 days of urgent referral, begin treatment in 96% of cases within another 31 days, and ensure the whole journey takes no longer than 62 days in 85% of cases.
These goals are set to ensure that people, in their darkest and most uncertain days, are attended to with the urgency they deserve so that they can stop waiting and start fighting – yet the numbers reveal a disappointing truth. Failing to meet cancer targets is no longer an outlier, but the standard that has been set in the NHS.
The BBC report that exposed the 118 NHS trusts failing to meet cancer targets, pinned these failures largely on logistics, blaming broken-down scanning and radiotherapy machines, misplacement of GP referral letters, and staffing issues. It feels deeply unjust that easily amendable factors are delaying cancer diagnoses and, in turn, costing the lives of cancer patients.
I don’t solely blame the factors discussed above for this failure. Our population’s demand for cancer treatment is simply greater than the capacity of our healthcare system. However, it should be a government’s responsibility to ensure that its healthcare system is equipped to deal with changing demand.
To understand the magnitude of what we are facing, some data suggests that there will be around 2.2 million new cancer cases diagnosed in the UK between 2024 and 2029, which is over 20% more than the number of cases in the previous 5 years.
Going forward, we must look inward, at our own successes and failures, as well as outward, at successful countries we should strive to emulate. Denmark, a country comparable to the UK in GDP and health spending, was also lagging behind in cancer survival 25 years ago but since then, has overtaken the UK. Between 2002 and 2014, Denmark increased its 5-year survival from 48% to about 61%, whilst the 5-year survival in the UK increased from 48% to only 55.7% between 2005 and 2016.
To achieve this impressive feat, Denmark first focused on technology and equipment. After installing more PET-CT scanners, they now have 6.6 PET-CT scanners per million people, over 8 times that in the UK.
Next, they focused on the people. Denmark ensured that each cancer patient had a personalised plan drawn out with timing targets that must be adhered to, and were reported when they weren’t. This sort of individualised care may seem unfathomable to a citizen of the UK, but is what we deserve; and Denmark proves it to be possible. That stark wake-up call 25 years ago should have shook the people of both the UK and Denmark. While Denmark chose to recognise their failures and rally together, the UK continued to sail along, placing bandages on bullet holes instead of making impactful long-term changes.
When I try to make sense of how we go forward from here, I keep coming back to three main areas that should be invested in; public health initiatives for cancer prevention, research and development of new treatments and diagnostics, and of course, the frontline NHS. Each is an essential piece of the puzzle.
True success will begin with investing in our health system. The NHS forms the solid base upon which initiative and innovation can stand, and right now it is crumbling. All of the revolutionary treatments in the world will never beat cancer if we don’t have the systems in place to diagnose and treat it early enough.
UK policy makers and clinicians need to hold themselves accountable, to meet the standards set by other countries and by our own targets. Our country has always been at the forefront of research, and we need to reinvest in our NHS to allow this to continue. Maybe then, I will again feel excited by the groundbreaking cancer research those lecturers were talking about. And maybe then, I will again have my child-like belief that we can one day ‘beat’ cancer, or at least give our patients a chance to fight it with the strength of the NHS behind them.
Growing up, I was one of those children who naively dreamt that I could be the one to ‘cure cancer’. Flash forward several years, I’ve made it to medical school, and lecture after pre-clinical lecture is about some new drug or treatment target that will revolutionise the treatment of cancer. But that isn’t the reality of the situation, is it? After doing more research, I began to see the headlines beyond the shiny new drugs and flashy research papers. We may be beating cancer in the lab, but we certainly aren’t in the hospitals.
Our country is failing cancer patients. Only 3 trusts out of 121 in England are meeting their cancer targets. These state that hospitals should; diagnose or rule out cancer in 75% of cases within 28 days of urgent referral, begin treatment in 96% of cases within another 31 days, and ensure the whole journey takes no longer than 62 days in 85% of cases.
These goals are set to ensure that people, in their darkest and most uncertain days, are attended to with the urgency they deserve so that they can stop waiting and start fighting – yet the numbers reveal a disappointing truth. Failing to meet cancer targets is no longer an outlier, but the standard that has been set in the NHS.
The BBC report that exposed the 118 NHS trusts failing to meet cancer targets, pinned these failures largely on logistics, blaming broken-down scanning and radiotherapy machines, misplacement of GP referral letters, and staffing issues. It feels deeply unjust that easily amendable factors are delaying cancer diagnoses and, in turn, costing the lives of cancer patients.
I don’t solely blame the factors discussed above for this failure. Our population’s demand for cancer treatment is simply greater than the capacity of our healthcare system. However, it should be a government’s responsibility to ensure that its healthcare system is equipped to deal with changing demand.
To understand the magnitude of what we are facing, some data suggests that there will be around 2.2 million new cancer cases diagnosed in the UK between 2024 and 2029, which is over 20% more than the number of cases in the previous 5 years.
Going forward, we must look inward, at our own successes and failures, as well as outward, at successful countries we should strive to emulate. Denmark, a country comparable to the UK in GDP and health spending, was also lagging behind in cancer survival 25 years ago but since then, has overtaken the UK. Between 2002 and 2014, Denmark increased its 5-year survival from 48% to about 61%, whilst the 5-year survival in the UK increased from 48% to only 55.7% between 2005 and 2016.
To achieve this impressive feat, Denmark first focused on technology and equipment. After installing more PET-CT scanners, they now have 6.6 PET-CT scanners per million people, over 8 times that in the UK.
Next, they focused on the people. Denmark ensured that each cancer patient had a personalised plan drawn out with timing targets that must be adhered to, and were reported when they weren’t. This sort of individualised care may seem unfathomable to a citizen of the UK, but is what we deserve; and Denmark proves it to be possible. That stark wake-up call 25 years ago should have shook the people of both the UK and Denmark. While Denmark chose to recognise their failures and rally together, the UK continued to sail along, placing bandages on bullet holes instead of making impactful long-term changes.
When I try to make sense of how we go forward from here, I keep coming back to three main areas that should be invested in; public health initiatives for cancer prevention, research and development of new treatments and diagnostics, and of course, the frontline NHS. Each is an essential piece of the puzzle.
True success will begin with investing in our health system. The NHS forms the solid base upon which initiative and innovation can stand, and right now it is crumbling. All of the revolutionary treatments in the world will never beat cancer if we don’t have the systems in place to diagnose and treat it early enough.
UK policy makers and clinicians need to hold themselves accountable, to meet the standards set by other countries and by our own targets. Our country has always been at the forefront of research, and we need to reinvest in our NHS to allow this to continue. Maybe then, I will again feel excited by the groundbreaking cancer research those lecturers were talking about. And maybe then, I will again have my child-like belief that we can one day ‘beat’ cancer, or at least give our patients a chance to fight it with the strength of the NHS behind them.
