Yesterday the All Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer launched a report highlighting appalling inequalities in the treatment and care of different cancer patients across the country.
The report says that older people with cancer often have less intensive and less radical treatment than younger people. And rather than that being because a clinician has assessed their situation and made a medical decision not to treat, for a worrying majority it seems they have just been deemed ‘too old’.
It also looks at how much worse the experience and chances of survival could be if a patient has a rarer cancer, such as pancreatic or liver cancer. There are fewer drugs - sometimes none - available for rarer cancers on the NHS, so people with rarer cancers often have to fight to get the drugs they need.
Thousands of lives could be saved each year if more was done to tackle inequality. The Group want the Government to introduce a one-year survival rate target for cancer patients of all ages (targets are only for under 75s at the moment), to focus attention on the vital first year after cancer is diagnosed. And they want a better way of deciding which cancer drugs are available on the NHS, as drugs for rarer cancers are currently far less likely to be approved.
The Campaigns Team wants to make a difference - to stamp out inequalities in cancer care for good. What inequalities do you think Macmillan should campaign on?
