CANCER patients in Scotland are indeed missing out on potentially life-saving treatment (“Cancer patients miss life-saving treatment due to staff shortages", The Herald, November 16); sadly this has gone on for years. As stated in your report, thanks to successive governments since 2000, every one of the five cancer centres in Scotland has the equipment to deliver the most up-to-date radiotherapy techniques which are known to be both more effective and less harmful. It must also be remembered that modern radiotherapy is far more effective in curing cancer than chemotherapy. It is essential, therefore, that our patients should be able to access it at its best.
Professor Anthony Chalmers of the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre has indicated that one difficulty is the lack of key staff due to difficulty in recruitment. The same argument holds in, for example, Australia yet, even in small satellite centres in socio-economically deprived regions, they can and do deliver what we are still lacking in some centres, modern radiotherapy. That the key medical staff we are lacking, the only ones licensed in UK to plan and prescribe radiotherapy, also still deliver chemotherapy here is never questioned. Yet it is in those countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, and most of Europe, where radiotherapy oncologists concentrate on the high skill levels demanded for complex modern radiotherapy techniques and do not deliver chemotherapy as well, that we find patients accessing such therapy. Might that access across the board to the best of radiotherapy be one reason their results are superior to ours?
Having introduced many of these complex treatments into a department in Australia back in the 1990s and having worked with the excellent team of physicists, and some of the radiographers and oncologists at the Beatson and with the support of management across the board to ensure our patients could receive the treatments we felt they needed, I can say this is not easy. Staff need encouragement, enthusiasm, vision, training and leadership. The Scottish Government, rather late in the day, has said extra oncology trainees will be provided. Their role should not stop at that belated acknowledgement of the problem. They must lead and demand more radical review and action nationally and in all the centres.
Dr Alan Rodger,
Clairmont Gardens, Glasgow.
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