The reasons for poor survival rates
1.7 There are a number of reasons why cancer patients in England often have a poorer prognosis than those in other European countries.
For some cancers, such as breast cancer and bowel cancer, this is partly because patients tend to have a more advanced stage of the disease by the time they are treated. This may be because they are not certain when to go to their GP about possible symptoms, because GPs, who see relatively few cases of cancer, may have difficulty identifying those at highest risk, or because of the time taken in hospitals to progress from the first appointment through diagnostic tests to treatment. Furthermore, the variation in quality and provision of services across the country means that not all patients are getting the optimal treatment for their particular condition.
1.8 Decades of under-investment in people and equipment have taken their toll. A service under pressure has struggled to adopt new ways of working and fully exploit new treatment methods to keep NHS cancer services at the forefront of international progress.
1.9 Equipment is out of date and is often incapable of delivering state of the art procedures for diagnosis and treatment. The NHS has too few cancer specialists of every type. For example, we have around 8 oncologists per million population, less than half that in other comparable European countries. And there has been a failure to modernise services by adopting new ways of treating patients. Incomplete standards of care for cancer services and inconsistent ways of assessing them has led to variations in quality of care.
