Arabnews24.ca:Thursday 8 June 2023 12:10 PM: More than 2.8 million people in England - one in 20 of the nation's inhabitants - received an urgent referral to a cancer specialist from a GP in the past year, triple the number from 2010 and the highest on record.
Almost 600,000 of those people had to wait longer than the recommended two weeks to see the specialist - more than 13 times as many as in 2010, Sky News analysis of new NHS England data reveals.
The number of people waiting longer than the recommended month to start cancer treatment after a specialist decided they needed it has grown by more than seven times since records began in 2010.
Waits last month for radiotherapy in particular were the longest ever recorded.
While staffing levels have also increased in this time, by more than 50%, more advanced and complicated treatments along with an older population with better survival rates, means demand on them is growing faster still.
The Royal College of Radiologists warns that without action from the government, the NHS "will have a 40% shortfall of radiologists by 2027 - up from 29% today. We will also face a 25% shortfall in clinical oncologists, up from 15% today."
Figures for the most recent months and years are not yet available, but cancer survival rates in general have been improving over recent years and decades.
Delays to treatment can be fatal though. Research published in the British Medical Journal suggested that the risk of death can be raised by 10% for each month that cancer treatment is delayed, with longer delays even more detrimental.
89% of local NHS areas fail to meet targets
Just 15 out of 141 local health providers managed to meet all three of the three main targets for cancer carei in May. Most of those were small centres.
Of the 130 trusts which started treatment for more than 15 patients last month, just eight passed all three measures.
The largest trusts to pass were Epsom and St Helier University Hospitals, covering Surrey and south London, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation, in West Yorkshire, and Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation, in South Yorkshire.
Among those performing worst were the Royal Marsden in London, where almost three quarters of the 535 potential cancer patients had to wait more than two weeks to see a consultant after being referred.
At Guys and St Thomas's, in south London, Royal Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, Princess Alexandra in Essex, and Shrewsbury & Telford, in Shropshire, more than three in five patients waited more than two months to start treatment after being referred by their GP.
Search for your local trust in the table below to see how they performed:
As with the overall figures, the trend of NHS Trusts failing to meet monthly targets was present before the pandemic and has continued.
Treatment delayed due to workforce shortages
The Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) published results from its workplace census today. It revealed that 97% of UK cancer centres had seen patients' treatment delayed because of staff shortages in the past year.
The number of radiologists and oncologists has actually grown by more than 50% since 2010, and by a quarter in just the past five years, but the RCR say this is still not enough to keep up with demand.
Dr Tom Roques, a clinical oncologist and Vice President of the RCR, explained to Sky News why staffing numbers needed to increase at a faster rate than the number of new people needing cancer treatment:
"Demand for cancer care is rising for a number of reasons," he said.
"Our ageing population means more people are diagnosed with cancer each year, and often patients who are older have multiple health conditions to manage at once, which makes treatment decisions more complicated.
"As research advances, people live longer with cancer - often trying many different treatments, sometimes several at once. The treatments themselves are also getting more complex.
"All of this means demand is growing, and the oncology workforce needs to grow too if we want to give patients the care they deserve."
Professor Peter Johnson, a Professor of Medical Oncology at the University of Southampton, told Sky News that this was a longer-term issue rather than one caused by the pandemic:
"There's no doubt that the NHS and its cancer services were under a lot of pressure before COVID came along," he said.
"The numbers of referrals for people for investigation of cancer have been going up 10% a year for the last decade. There was a very brief downturn in COVID, and then it's just picked up where it left off.
"The numbers of people getting cancer, of course, has not changed. They've continued to rise. So yes, COVID didn't help and it gave us a problem of a backlog because a lot of services were so disrupted, but actually no this is all about long term lack of people and kit, which were urgently trying to correct."
An NHS England spokesperson said: "NHS staff have been working flat out to deliver checks and treatment for patients with cancer - and actually the vast majority - more than nine out of 10 - begin treatment within one month."
Research published by the NHS in January also showed that they had delivered cancer care for more people, in the year to October 2022, than any other on record.
