For the teenage cancer patient, hospitals can be bewildering places. Many young people are referred straight into the adult system and find themselves in intimidating waiting rooms surrounded by people four times their age. They may be the only young cancer patient on their doctor’s books. Sixteen-year-olds cannot always be expected to know what questions to ask their doctor, or what symptoms or other information they should flag up. In short, teenagers, like children, require special treatment.
That is precisely what the excellent new Three-Year Cancer Plan for Children and Young People in Scotland seeks to deliver. It aims to ensure that these young patients get the best possible treatment. That starts with getting every health professional they come into contact with to understand their needs, and collaborate in looking after them.
This plan, driven forward by the enthusiasm and energy of clinicians, will introduce a new target of 21 days for the diagnosis of children’s cancers and two weeks between diagnosis and treatment. These are not Government-imposed targets of the sort that many doctors and nurses believe have become unsustainable and lead to skewed priorities; these are targets that they themselves, in conjunction with patients, believe should be adhered to. Children often have cancers that grow fast, making such targets vitally important. The survival rate in children varies somewhat depending on the type of cancer, but has greatly improved in the past 50 years and is currently more than 80 per cent overall. Swift diagnosis and treatment targets can only help improve care further.
Children account for a small percentage of the overall number of cancer cases in Scotland, with leukaemia, brain tumours and lymphomas the most common types. It is therefore unsurprising that paediatric and young people’s cancer services tend to be less well developed in health board areas with small populations than in big urban areas. That makes the creation of an enhanced cancer registry for children and young people with cancer all the more important because it will allow each patient’s progress to be monitored and measured, wherever they are in Scotland; overall comparisons between Scotland and other countries can then also be made. Measures to improve access for young patients to appropriate clinical trials, which are part of the standard treatment landscape for adults with cancer, will also make a difference. All in all, the plan should make children’s cancer treatment in Scotland the best in the UK.
There is a lot of unhappiness in the NHS at present, the result of growing demand and insufficient funding. That issue has understandably tended to dominate the news narrative about the NHS, including in this newspaper.
But this innovation is a reminder of the sheer excellence that exists in the Scottish health service. Admittedly children’s cancer is not an area that has been squeezed financially like some other NHS services, but nor does this plan require a major cash injection. What it requires above all is openness to new ways of working among clinicians. With that, and the evident determination of doctors like Prof Hamish Wallace who are leading the charge, it promises to deliver on its promise of a safe, sustainable world class cancer service for children and young people and that is very cheering indeed.
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