Professor Gordon Wishart is chief medical officer at Check4Cancer and a visiting professor of cancer surgery at Anglia Ruskin University
Last week, amid a flurry of election policies and debates, a striking report found that cancer survival in England currently lags up to 25 years behind European countries like Sweden, Norway and Denmark. From bowel cancer to breast diagnoses, England is firmly lagging behind our Scandinavian neighbours. What’s to blame? Why aren’t major parties discussing
As many as 100,000 patients had a cancer that was missed, or had their diagnoses or treatments delayed during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. That’s the shocking finding of a recent study by the Institute of Cancer Policy at King’s College London. The experts conclude that some patients will already have died, many still
One of the biggest mistakes made in previous lockdowns was to neglect non-Covid healthcare, cancer especially. As we prepare for an Omicron wave, might we be about to make the same mistake? Chris Whitty was asked this in a parliamentary inquiry recently and he was surprisingly dismissive. ‘This is sometimes said by people who have
Everyone understood the government message in March 2020 to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. Yet the lives that we knew were being saved were ones from Covid-19. Anything more long-term than daily figures never registered. The concept of other causes of death – most devastatingly cancer – were secondary concerns. We may
It is hard to remember a time when the daily drip of Covid statistics was not part of our lives. Since March 2020, we have been greeted every afternoon with a stream of government released data filling us in on the number of infections, hospitalisations and deaths. But how necessary is it today? With a current
The 10 Downing Street press conferences on Covid-19 tend not to show graphs about cancer care. We see various charts by statisticians and epidemiologists, but the impact of lockdown on patients with time critical conditions such as cancer has been largely ignored. The disruption of cancer services is a global phenomenon, but the suspension of
