Sick man of Europe: UK fails cancer sufferers
CANCER survival rates in Britain are lower than almost anywhere else in Europe.
Only a few former eastern bloc countries fare worse, a report has found.
The UK’s performance is on a par with that of some eastern European countries that have less than a third of our health budget.
The Conservatives said it shows that Labour targets are undermining performance in the NHS.
Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley said: “The Labour Government’s obsession with targets has sidelined important factors which improve overall cancer outcomes.
“Instead of only addressing referral to treatment times, the Government should allow health professionals to focus on five-year survival rates incorporating the recommendations in the Cancer Plan.”
The study found that survival for the four most common cancers – colorectal, lung, breast and prostate – and for ovarian cancer was highest in Nordic countries, except Denmark, and in central Europe.
The UK and Ireland were below average. The only countries with worse survival rates for all cancers than the UK were the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Poland.
As expected, countries with higher total national expenditure on health generally had better all-cancer survival.
But the UK and Denmark had lower survival than countries with similar health expenditure.
The Department of Health’s national cancer director Professor Mike Richards welcomed the findings, and said they show many more lives could be saved if the “outcomes in all countries were brought up to the standards of the best countries”.
He stressed the conclusion that poor results from the UK reported in previous studies by the same group are due mainly to patients having more advanced disease at diagnosis.
He said this indicates that “particular emphasis should be put on achieving earlier diagnosis”.
The Lancet Oncology journal, which published the report, said it proved the NHS’s Cancer Plan is not working, and indicated a need for the Government to stop using the NHS to score political points.
“The answers are likely to lead to a fundamental reassessment of the ways in which the NHS operates – such as divorcing the NHS from political control and short-term political gains,” it claimed.
Professor Richard Sullivan of Cancer Research UK said the results “show encouraging improvements for the UK”. But he added: “This study shows that cancer is certainly not a ‘ticked box’. We need a sustained effort to beat the disease.”
The Eurocare-4 study, the largest of its kind, logged the number of cancer patients in 83 registries in 23 countries who lived for five years or more after diagnosis.
Dr Franco Berrino, of the National Cancer Institute in Milan led a team who analysed survival data for 2.7 million adult patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999 and compared them with those diagnosed between 1990 and 1994.
It found overall cancer survival rates in Europe continue to improve. And wide differences in survival rates between countries might be narrowing, it claimed.
The 2000 NHS Cancer Plan set out a national strategy for tackling the disease.
