Ex-health secretary reveals he’s got cancer – and blames budget cuts
FORMER Tory health secretary Andrew Lansley has revealed he has bowel cancer, and last night criticised the Treasury for opposing a scheme to catch the disease early.
Lord Lansley, 61, said he was receiving chemotherapy for the disease and had ‘every reason’ to hope he will survive longterm.
But he criticised the Treasury for ‘wrongly’ thwarting a screening programme he introduced which might have caught the cancer sooner.
Lord Lansley told The Daily Telegraph he discovered his Stage 3 tumours only after his wife Sally ‘nagged’ him to see a GP because of back pain.
As health secretary under David Cameron, Lord Lansley launched a screening programme for the cancer called Bowelscope in 2010.
It was due to be rolled out nationally in 2016, but the scheme is currently available to only 50 per cent of the population, due in part to a shortage of endoscopists and support staff.
Lord Lansley blamed cuts to the Health Education England budget, which the Treasury ‘treated, wrongly, as a budget not within the NHS ringfence’. He added that he ‘would have been called to this new screening programme’, had it been implemented as planned.
Stage 3 tumours are normally in the bowel wall and may also have spread to nearby lymph nodes, but not to other parts of the body. Almost 65 per cent of men whose bowel cancer is diagnosed at this stage can expect to live beyond five years, according to Cancer Research UK.
Lord Lansley said if Bowelscope was running properly, it could
‘Survival must not be about luck’
save 3,000 lives a year. Bowel cancer, if diagnosed early, is curable,’ he said. ‘That has to be our aim.’
Lord Lansley said he was ‘lucky’ to have seen a GP who referred him to a specialist and a ‘firstrate’ NHS surgical team which carried out his sevenhour operation.
But he added that cancer survival ‘must not be about luck’ and said he ‘feels deeply’ for BBC presenter George Alagiah, 62, who has Stage 4 bowel cancer. Mr Alagiah said last month that if the NHS in England had a Scottishstyle screening system at 50 – instead of 60 – his cancer might have been caught while it was curable.
Currently only 10 per cent of bowel cancer cases are diagnosed through screening, with roughly a fifth of diagnoses not made until the patient is in an emergency department. By this time, the cancer has often spread around the body and cannot be cured.
The Government has committed to introducing a new test for bowel cancer called FIT (faecal immunochemical test).
Lord Lansley called for Bowelscope to be introduced immediately and for the screening age to be reduced to 50. He added: ‘I was fortunate that I was in a hospital which does conduct such testing,’ he said. ‘Bowel cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in the country. It should be so much less.
‘These priorities for progress can save money and make a real difference. By prevention and early diagnosis, we can save lives and save money.’
One in 14 men and one in 19 women in Britain will be diagnosed with bowel cancer at some point in their life, according to Cancer Research UK.
About 16,000 people die from the disease each year.
Deborah Alsina, of Bowel Cancer UK, said: ‘As Lord Lansley rightly highlights, we need to urgently invest in both the endoscopy and pathology workforce to ensure we can deliver an optimal bowel cancer screening programme.’