It's the management of the NHS that fails

Of course, having a near Stalinist bureaucracy is unlikely to lead us to a well managed service. But recent findings about the impact of Covid on cancer treatments should give pause:

However, new analysis published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that increasing the wait to surgery from six to 12 weeks would increase the risk of death by around nine per cent.

The scientists at Queen’s University in Ontario and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that even a delay of less than four weeks could not be justified.

The calculated a four per cent increased risk of death for a two-week delay for breast cancer surgery.

Across a wider range of cancers, a month’s delay to the start of treatment more broadly, such as chemotherapy or radiotherapy, was associated with an increased risk of death of up to 13 per cent.

Of course, we all understand why treatments have been recently delayed. But the message here is that cancer treatment should be started stat. The very thing that the NHS does not do:

You should not have to wait more than 2 weeks to see a specialist if your GP suspects you have cancer and urgently refers you.

In cases where cancer has been confirmed, you should not have to wait more than 31 days from the decision to treat to the start of treatment.

This being a promise the NHS doesn’t live up to either.

This not being a matter of some scarcity of resources. The same number of people get treated for the same number of cancers. It’s simply bad deployment of those resources - management in an inflexible system - which makes people wait. And so, more of them die.

There is a reason why the NHS comes near bottom of rich world health care systems when measured by “mortality amenable to health care”. The reason being that structure of the NHS.