Figures show that the average wait for cancer treatment in Britain is 55 days, one week longer than two years ago, and the lengthy wait is leading to avoidable deaths and makes the United Kingdom one of the worst places in Europe to get the disease.
Waiting time is measured from when a patient is referred by a GP to when they start their first treatment in the hospital.
Some parts of the country have more extended waits than the 55-day average.
The United Kingdom came 33rd out of 41 developed nations for cancer mortality in 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found. Only Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Slovenia, Poland, Latvia, Slovakia and Hungary were worse.
The UK’s annual cancer mortality rate, of 216 per 100,000 people is the highest out of the G7 countries. Experts believe the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to survival rates declining for the first time in a generation.
In 2020, some 38,000 fewer people were diagnosed with cancer than in 2019.
Professor Sir Mike Richards, former cancer director at the Department of Health and now chairman of the UK national screening committee, told a newspaper outlet that across a spectrum of diseases, but especially in cancer, they offer a late diagnosis service in this country, and that needs to be tackled urgently.
He said that there are numerous factors, many of which were present long before the pandemic, but which were made worse by COVID-19.
Waiting times for vital CT and MRI scans have increased tenfold in the past three years, with about 300,000 patients waiting longer than six weeks for cancer tests in England, and in 2020, England performed 99 CT scans per 1,000 people compared with 113 in Spain, 150 in Germany, 196 in Denmark and 205 in Belgium.
Similarly, England performed 63 MRI scans per 1,000 people compared with 150 in Germany, 85 in Spain and 91 in Denmark. In the United Kingdom, approximately 167,000 people die from cancer every year.
Martin Marshall, head of the Royal College of GPs, said that the delays that they see in diagnosing cancer were a product of three factors, some related to patients, some related to the gatekeeper function of GPs and some related to the wider system.
Michelle Mitchell, from Cancer Research UK, said that delays of several weeks can often have serious implications in terms of prognosis and that early diagnosis and prompt treatment need to be a top priority for the Government.
That’s almost two months. Envision having cancer and sitting there for two months wondering if it’s spread because of the time wait. Wondering when you’ll get treatment, that’s mental torture. Wishing you were wealthy enough to get seen the next day, knowing that those with money will survive whilst you could die, it’s despicable.
The majority of us are enmeshed in a decreasing spiral as regards our living standards, long-term health and well-being. There’s simply no point trying to grow old now in the United Kingdom, but of course, that’s what our government want, they want us to all die extremely fast.
So, that’s a wait from the date of the decision on how to treat, this is surgery, radiation therapy, chemo et cetera, or a combination of all of them, but the actual wait from diagnosis might be much longer.
Now bang your pots and pans for the NHS! But it wouldn’t matter who ran the NHS or how much they ploughed into it. It’s a system that performs operations for gender new parts whilst cancer patients have to wait, and it needs to be changed to do what it was meant to do, instead of this mess it’s in now.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 