The highly paid apparatchiks of NHS England should be profoundly ashamed of this data and not put it out as triumphalist propaganda.
By international standards a two-month wait before starting cancer treatment is appalling putting us on par with the developing world. We have poured our money into our NHS. We should be on par with the best in Europe where most cancer treatment begins within days of diagnosis. Yet despite a similar spend every metric is bad – number of diagnostic scanners, chemotherapy chairs, radiotherapy machines and oncologists per million people. The NHS is only ahead of Europe in its number of spin doctors and diversity officers.
The two-week wait for a hospital appointment for suspected cancer was conceived by a committee on which I sat in 2000. It was meant to be a pragmatic stopgap while services improved. This never happened and it was abandoned by the last government.
Now nearly a third of patients are still waiting more than two-months for treatment and there is no improvement on the horizon. Only three years ago, we were launching a 28-day diagnosis to treatment target. This was quietly dropped by the high priests as unachievable.
Cancer doesn’t play politics – it grows and kills. The longer you wait the more it spreads.
Stage 1 disease with a 90% chance of cure becomes stage 3 within months and the cure rate drops to 25%. There’s nothing wrong with our treatment services once you get to them. The reason we are bouncing along the bottom of the European survival league tables is simply the delay in getting started.
The NHS pulled out the stops for the Covid vaccine. We need the same ruthless efficiency to deal with the cancer backlog. There is plenty of capacity lying unused in the private sector. There is abundant talent out there: nurses, radiographers and doctors who know exactly how to create a far more efficient system locally. Let’s fill the hospital car parks at weekends – cancer doesn’t take them off. But first let’s admit we have a problem just as our Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, has done with the whole of the NHS.
Snazzy press releases on a bank holiday do future cancer patients no favours. Accepting we have a problem and liberating the imagination of our talented workforce from the bureaucracy at the top could save many lives.
Professor Sikora is a Consultant Oncologist and former Director of the World Health Organisation’s Cancer Programme.