A leading world authority on cancer has slammed NHS bosses for complacency over lengthening waiting lists for treatment.
Professor Karol Sikora of the University of Buckingham told GB News: “Things have got worse based on the two metrics the NHS use, which are reasonable metrics. The first is the number of people being seen within two weeks after their GP thinks they’ve got cancer.
“That’s called the two week wait, that’s fallen right down to less than 70% of what it should be.
“The other metric is the number of weeks you have to wait from diagnosis of cancer to the first treatment of cancer. And it shouldn’t be less than two months.
“So that’s a very generous target as you can imagine, and in America you’d be treated next week, here, it is two months. So we’ve got a problem.”
In an interview with Alastair Stewart on GB News, Dr Sikora added: “In addition to that, we don’t have the capacity. Unfortunately, both capacity for chemotherapy and capacity for radiotherapy is really lacking.
“We opened centres called Rutherford cancer centres. But the business plan didn’t work, and they went bust in June of this year, and here we are in November and they’re still not open.
“We’ve got to use every possible bit of capacity for cancer care that we can.”
He added: “You could blame Covid for a lot of stuff but now we’re a year out of any serious Covid pandemic and we shouldn’t have the capacity problem and of course, two years ago, there was a capacity building up even without Covid, so yeah, it’s all come at once.
“People will go privately. It’s sad, because if you can’t afford it, surely you’ve paid your taxes you’re entitled to NHS care. For the medical director of NHS England to say it doesn’t matter because we’re so good at treating it – don’t think he’d like that for his mother, for example.”
“But in the long term, there’s no solution, there’s no plan, there’s no workforce plan for the future.
“We’ve got to expand medical school entry. It’s been static for the last decade. We’ve got to expand it to get more doctors, not just in oncology, cancer medicine, but right across the board, more GPs, and we can’t just import them…
“By all means import people for training to allow them to experience UK medicine, but it’s got to be more than that. We can’t drain poorer countries by paying for a country’s doctors more money. It’s not a solution. We’ve got to get a proper solution.”
