the UK's cancer problem

These headlines pop up now and again in "superior" health-care spots like Canada and the UK, where cancer patients often get short shrift.

Headline:

The UK’s cancer-survival rate is a national disgrace – and GPs are partly responsible

DESPITE our excellence in life-sciences and research, the UK has the worst overall cancer survival of any country in the G7 and most other high-income countries. GPs are partly to blame.

In a recent world ranking of five-year cancer survival, the UK was 28th for stomach and lung cancer, 26th for pancreas and brain cancers and 21st and 16th for liver and oesophageal cancers respectively. This amounts to a national disgrace.

It’s a tight race at the top, but probably Australia has the best cancer survival in the world.

It is an indisputable fact that early diagnosis is the best way to improve cancer survival. No amount of radiotherapy or chemotherapy can restore the advantage lost by late diagnosis and the inevitable deterioration in prognosis.

There is an enormous incentive for government to promote earlier diagnosis because the cost of treating advanced cancer can be tens of times greater than for early cancer. There would also be less need for radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which would unblock the system.

Cancers in the UK are diagnosed at a more advanced stage than in other countries. For example, only 14.4 per cent of bowel cancers are diagnosed early in the UK (stage 1) compared with 20.8 per cent in Australia. Meanwhile 29.7 per cent of bowel cancers in the UK are diagnosed with advanced disease (stage 4) compared with 21.2 per cent in Australia. Similar evidence exists for breast cancer.

Research published in 2022 confirmed that 37 per cent of mostly abdominal cancers in the UK were diagnosed late in A&E with acute symptoms, advanced disease and a poor prognosis. We fared worse than other high-income countries in an international study published in Lancet Oncology.

Central planning gets in the way of better health care. Switch to a more market-driven system and watch costs go down while efficiency goes up. There are still trade-offs, though, as I know from the South Korean system, which is more market-driven but riddled with incompetence and significantly behind the West in terms of innovative, aggressive treatment.