10 Jan Less Survivable Cancers: how do we have less of the less?
Less Survivable Cancers (LSCs), by definition, have worse outcomes than other cancers, but many people do not realise just how much worse this situation truly is. The average five-year life expectancy for LSCs is just 16% whereas almost all other cancers have five-year survival rates in excess of 50%.
This gap in outcomes is deep rooted. The last forty years have seen significant improvements in cancer care and treatment, leading to better patient outcomes for most cancers. But patients with LSCs have seen almost no improvements. In addition, they often receive worse diagnosis and care, and have very little data collected on them, inhibiting research and innovation.
Furthermore, LSCs are not currently receiving the policy attention they deserve. Government is laser focused on immediate challenges such as easing the NHS backlog, providing sufficient staffing to deliver safe care, and tackling the winter crisis. The Prime Minister is very much driving the agenda when it comes to health, and the long-term plan refresh is seemingly dead, with no interest from the current Secretary of State outside of emergency and elective recovery.
What’s missing from current debate is long term change; how do we improve outcomes for patients? LSCs form a huge part of this and resonate beyond the short term. These cancers currently have no specific targets for addressing the inequality in survival and ICS’ have no obligation to develop specific LSC plans. These are things that should clearly happen as part of long-term thinking and planning to improve patient outcomes. The NHS should be seeking to serve people as best as possible, and this means not solely focusing on immediate capacity challenges, as important as they are.
As the life sciences industry, we must work in partnership with the NHS to ensure that attention is focused on the areas where can we make the biggest improvements. That means highlighting the key questions NHS leaders should be looking to address. Do we have the right data to support sensible decision making? Do we have the right pathways to ensure patients can access the latest and best treatments? Do we have systems in place to support innovation in disease areas where progress has stagnated?
Working together is essential to the success of this endeavour, but with warnings coming that action to address the current NHS crisis is too little too late, there is a growing worry that some diseases, including LSCs, will continue to be neglected, leading to a widening outcomes gap between less and more survivable cancers.
This Wednesday we will be supporting the Less Survivable Cancers Awareness Day, adding our voice to efforts to increase awareness of the poor outcomes facing patients with LSCs, and the need for new approaches to address the system challenges which have so far thwarted efforts to close the cancer outcomes gap.
There has never been a more important time to raise awareness of this, so to get involved please visit: https://lesssurvivablecancers.org.uk/first-ever-less-survivable-cancers-awareness-day/.
We hope you will join us in this mission.
Cameron Miller, Associate Director