Big day for cancer services review
Cancer care review engagement session in Yarmouth to help shape recommendations of final report
Wednesday, June 13 was a big day when it came to the review that’s underway of cancer services in western Nova Scotia.
The question people will be waiting to see answered now is whether the review will recommend that radiation services be located at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital.
They won’t have an answer until a finalized report goes to the health minister this summer. But a daylong engagement session with 15 stakeholders last week in Yarmouth was expected to help shape the recommendations to be contained in a final report. That session included cancer patient advisers and cancer health professionals from Yarmouth and Halifax and included a presentation of all of the information that has been gathered during the review.
“The deliberations, we feel, will carry a lot of weight,” Dr. Drew Bethune, the medical director of the Nova Scotia Health Author- ity’s (NSHA) Nova Scotia Cancer Care Program, had said in an interview prior to that engagement session. “This will be the end of the process.”
The review’s report will be submitted to the minister of health and the Department of Health and Wellness and senior leadership of NSHA. Last week’s session was a confidential, in- camera session and the results are not being shared with the public in advance of the report being finalized.
Asked what options for recommendations existed, Dr. Bethune said, “there will be recommendations looking either at the status quo, putting in a radiation therapy machine here or a bundle of options that would help to relieve the problems that people have with travel.”
He said one thing that has happened during the review is the cost of building a bunker and installing a linear accelerator at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital (the type of equipment needed) has been re-evaluated in light of new technologies.
“It’s less than before. Before it was $39 million and now I think it’s around $20 million to build it and ongoing costs to operate it were $3.2 million before and I think it’s close to the same. Those are ballpark figures,” he said.
ENGAGING THE PUBLIC
As part of this review, 943 Nova Scotians completed surveys and 24 people from Yarmouth participated in two focus groups.
“We were very pleased with the interest and thoughtful responses we received from the community,” said Dr. Bethune, adding this has helped to better understand the human side of travelling to Halifax if you have cancer.
This review of cancer services in western Nova Scotia got underway last fall. Another thing that took shape last year was a grassroots social media movement on Facebook (largely started by Yarmouth resident Derek Lesser), which has drawn more attention to the hardships – physically, emotionally, mentally and financially – that people in western Nova Scotia go through when they have to travel to Halifax, often for extended periods, to access radiation Dr. Drew Bethune, the medical director of the Nova Scotia Health Authority’s Nova Scotia Cancer Care Program. treatment. That Western Nova Scotia Cancer Support Network social media group has about 18,500 members.
Yarmouth town Coun. Sandy Dennis, herself battling cancer, also brought the issue to the town council table.
And last summer, a petition gathered about 13,000 names supporting the push for radiation services here.
Initially there had been talk of the cancer services review wrapping up in the spring, but Dr. Bethune said this has been a complex review and they’ve wanted to ensure it is a thorough and fair process.
“We’ve been pushing hard, we’ve been meeting very frequently, every week or two weeks, but there have been sub-committees meeting at the same time,” he said. “As a province we don’t have unlimited resources and we have to look very carefully at how we spend this amount of money. There are many options in cancer care and we’re struggling to pay for them now. There are choices you make and we just want to make this choice as wisely as possible.”
INFORMATION GATHERED
Dr. Bethune talked about some of the other things that have happened during this review.
“We’ve looked at population trends and population that would potentially require radiation technology here. We’ve looked at options, if we didn’t build the machine here, what options there are, and we’ve got a package of those options,” he said. “We’ve also looked at comparisons in the cancer program,” he said, saying for around the same cost, what cancer services could you be offering to the province as a whole.
“We also have a new head of radiation oncology who joined us April 3 and we had a meeting to solicit his input also,” Bethune said.
Then there was the compiling and analysing of all of the survey information and the information presented during focus groups. All of this, and more, has taken time, said Dr. Bethune.
“We’ve been really pushing to get this done as quickly as possible, but we want to do it properly. It’s a balance,” he said. “We don’t want to wait forever to have everything perfect, but I’ve been really happy with my team (and) our public engagement process was very thorough.”
He personally had looked forward to further tapping into the wisdom of everyone who was going to be involved in last Wednesday’s session.
“I’m passionate about the process because I believe everybody has a lot to offer to the process and instead of having a bunch of experts telling you what you need, we’re engaging people in a meaningful way,” he said.