Bypass GPs to defeat cancer patient backlog, ministers told
PEOPLE with cancer symptoms should be encouraged to bypass their GP and go directly to diagnostics clinics in order to defeat the post-lockdown backlog, a leading oncologist has said.
Prof Karol Sikora, a consultant oncologist who was in charge of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme, is urging the Government to empower symptomatic people to selfrefer to polyclinics if they have suffered symptoms for more than two weeks.
Cancer Research UK also told The Sunday Telegraph such a policy “could be one way to try to get more patients into the health system”, although more research would be needed to understand how it could work in practice.
Prof Sikora claims his proposal would tackle long-standing concerns about the speed of Britain’s cancer diagnoses and help reduce excess cancer deaths.
He said: “When you get a health crisis like Covid, the lack of British diagnostic capacity for cancer gets amplified, and so the system can’t deal with a cancer backlog effectively.”
Prof Sikora said that as Britain came out of the crisis, “it’s time to really look and see how we can streamline pathways for potential cancer patients to get into the health service by going to polyclinics, which can do scans and so on”.
He added: “Any symptoms that persist for more than two weeks at any part of the body deserve investigation by bypassing the GP.”
Addressing concerns that too many people may take up the offer of fasttracked testing, he said: “If you speed the system up for everybody, the cancer patients will come out.
“We could even construct a series of algorithms around cancer with pathways which are set.”
Britain has a relatively poor record on cancer survival compared with other Western nations, according to studies such as the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership, which has been linked to slow diagnoses by British GPs.
A government spokesman said: “Cancer diagnosis and treatment has remained a top priority throughout the pandemic, with 1.7million urgent referrals and over 228,000 people starting treatment between March and December last year.”