DO contact NHS if you’re worried you’ve got cancer
Hancock urges stay-away patients to return
CANCER treatments are set to be restored to the NHS as daily deaths from coronavirus dropped below 400 for the first time in four weeks.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that the most urgent NHS services will restart from today, as he stressed that the NHS is ‘open’ and asked the public to ‘help us help you’.
Noting that A&E attendances were down by more than 50 per cent last week, Mr Hancock used the daily Government briefing to tell those who are unwell to seek help as they normally would.
Patients are thought to be staying away from hospital for fear of burdening the health service or because they are frightened of catching the virus.
The Daily Mail has reported warnings from Cancer Research UK that as many as 2,700 cancers a week may have gone undiagnosed amid the coronavirus crisis.
As the daily death toll fell to 360, Mr Hancock said yesterday: ‘Our message is that the NHS is open – help us to help you. If you are worried about chest pains for instance, maybe you might be having a heart attack or a stroke – or you feel a lump and you are worried about cancer... please come forward and seek help as you always would.
‘It’s so important that everybody uses the NHS responsibly, and the NHS will always be there for you when you need it.’
NHS England sent out guidelines last month telling doctors to prioritise cancer cases depending on urgency.
In one example of the pressures on the health service,
Barking, Havering and Redbridge NHS Trust in London temporarily suspended all operations and chemotherapy for cancer patients.
Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, previously warned the outbreak could result in 50,000 cancer deaths.
But yesterday Mr Hancock announced the restoration of NHS services is set to begin with the most urgent treatment, including cancer care and mental health support.
It has previously been suggested that the largely unused Nightingale hospitals, built to provide extra capacity for coronavirus patients, could be used for cancer treatment.
Mr Hancock said services could come back as hospitalisations from coronavirus are falling. So too are deaths in hospital, with the figure of 360 the lowest recorded since
March 30. Numbers reported at the start of the week are always artificially lower because there are fewer notifications of deaths at the weekend.
But Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said the overall trend is indeed showing a ‘gradual decline’ in deaths, although not every part of the country is yet fully past the peak. Dr Thomas House, of the University of Manchester, said: ‘We have been seeing encouraging figures for hospital admissions and now we are seeing a clear improvement in the thing we all really care about – deaths in hospital from coronavirus.
‘At a time when some people may feel as if they are close to breaking point with the lockdown, maybe they can now see that this is really getting us somewhere.’ However Mr Hancock expressed concern about falling numbers in A&E, with only 221,000 attendances last week, compared to 447,000 in the same period last year.
While fewer road accidents and people staying at home more may be part of the reason, he said: ‘We also know that fewer people are coming to the NHS when they need to.’
Professor Whitty yesterday said that the virus has a ‘very long way to run’ and that deaths will exceed the 21,092 who have so far died in the first wave.
‘Feeling close to breaking point’