‘Patients turned away due to overcrowding’
PATIENTS are being turned away from the country’s only dedicated state-run centre for cancer because of overcrowding, it has been claimed as the country marked Cancer Week.
Many in-patients are instead being sent to stay in other hospital wards because the Oncology Centre, which opened just 19 months ago within the grounds of Lefkoşa State Hospital, is “frequently full”, a union leader said this week.
Cyprus Turkish Doctors’ Union head Ahmet Varış said the Oncology Centre had recently been operating at “full capacity”.
He said nearly 1,800 people were treated at the centre in 2017 — but added that the third floor of the building, designed to provide space for up to 23 inpatients, had yet to be put into use due to “staff shortages”.
Dr Varış said the problems had been exacerbated by a rise in the number of cancer cases in the TRNC.
He said that a total of 26,340 “clinical examinations” had been carried out at the Oncology Centre throughout 2017 by just six doctors.
His comments came during North Cyprus’s Cancer Week, which ends today and was held this year under the slogan: “I can do it! We can do it!”
Health Minister Filiz Besim and Oncology Centre head Özlem Gürkut held a joint press conference on Monday, during which they released figures from the newly established Cancer Observation Centre.
The statistics showed there were 640 new cancer cases in 2012, 1,033 in 2013, and 1,100 in 2014.
Cancer is the second biggest killer in the TRNC, behind heart disease, according to 2012 figures.
Figures for the last three years will be released once the Cancer Observation Centre has completed its research, Dr Besim said.
Fighting cancer was one of her “biggest priorities”, she said, adding that she was planning to set up a Preventive Health Unit for the one-third of cancer cases that she said were avoidable.
Dr Gürkut said there were currently 4,858 cancer patients registered with the Oncology Centre, which started providing oncology, haematology and oncology radiotherapy services in September 2016.
She said more than 4,305 patients had been examined there in the first three months of 2018 — 1,252 in January, 1,267 in February and 1,513 in March.