Macmillan Cancer Support estimates that more than three million people in the UK are affected by cancer.
A new policy review, produced by cancer specialists and experts from across the UK, including King’s College London (KCL), has identified the top 10 cancer challenges facing the UK’s new government.
Published in The Lancet OncologyThe review highlights pressing issues affecting the delivery of cancer care services in the NHS which need to be urgently addressed through a comprehensive national cancer control plan.
According to Macmillan Cancer Support, it is estimated that more than three million people in the UK are affected by cancer, the most common of which is breast cancer, affecting more than 55,000 people.
The authors said the UK’s NHS was lagging behind other countries and that failure to prioritise could put further strain on the health system, widen social inequalities and weaken the economic recovery.
The report highlighted some continuing failures in reducing inequalities in cancer survival, warned about delays in treatment, and warned that novel solutions such as new diagnostic tests have been identified as solutions to the cancer crisis. But the paper states clearly that “none of these have addressed the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem.”
To address these challenges, experts have developed a number of recommendations to improve survival, quality of life and experiences for cancer patients in the UK.
Policy recommendations include tackling social inequalities in cancer access and outcomes by establishing an NHS taskforce to inform policy solutions, identifying spare capacity through modelling and building governance around the use of local capacity, testing operational interventions to speed up processes such as waiting times and reduce the cancer backlog, expanding national audits across the UK and studying how hospitals and specialists can drive change to tackle variations in cancer quality across the NHS.
Cancer Policy Institute expert Richard Sullivan said: “A new national cancer control plan must adopt a whole-system approach, integrating solutions to key areas such as the workforce, quality of services and social equity.”
