Plan to battle cancer faster

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This article was published 11/06/2011 (5237 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Jeff Cook has seen the good and the bad of cancer care in Manitoba.

The 42-year-old occupational therapist was just 18 when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer, received treatment almost immediately and survived.

His sister, Jean, wasn’t so lucky. She contracted colorectal cancer in her mid-40s. It took six long months for her condition to be fully diagnosed and treatment to begin. She died in 2007 at the age of 46.

On Friday, CancerCare Manitoba and the provincial government unveiled an ambitious plan, based on a British model, to reduce cancer-treatment wait times to two months from the current three to nine months.

The new cancer-fighting game plan means treatment begins within 60 days from the time a family doctor suspects a patient has cancer. And it will require a massive system overhaul that will take an estimated five years to accomplish. The province has budgeted $40 million to aid the process.

As part of the overhaul, patient advocates will be assigned to work with families to help them through the difficult process and ensure there are no roadblocks in patient treatment.

“This is huge,” Cook said after the announcement, which took place in a large, elegant room at the Legislative Building used for special ceremonies. Premier Greg Selinger made the announcement to a crowd of doctors, health administrators, government staff and cabinet ministers — some of whom were fighting back tears because cancer has struck their families.

Shorter treatment wait times and patient advocates will improve survival rates and reduce stress for families, said Cook, who is now a member of the board of the Canadian Cancer Society.

“The lack of certainty, the lack of control, the loneliness… and the fear of the unknown contribute to a lot of anxiety and can be very overwhelming,” an emotional Cook said, pausing to compose himself as he told the crowd of his family’s experiences.

Manitoba is the first province in Canada to adopt the internationally recognized British model, which has been replicated in Australia and New Zealand.

Sir Michael Richards, a U.K. cancer specialist who was knighted in 2009 for his work to reduce wait times there, said the British experience shows the two-month goal is achievable. He will advise Manitoba as it revamps its system.

The $40 million the province is prepared to spend will help, but money alone isn’t the answer, Richards said. “Certainly, the extra investment is very valuable and helps to get things started, but the key element here is in redesign so that we can get efficiency in the system.”

Dr. Dhali Dhaliwal, president of CancerCare Manitoba, said the changes envisioned are “transformative,” not incremental. He vowed money will only be spent on plans that demonstrate results.

CancerCare has been planning the overhaul for four years, and it’s been working out some of the implementation details for the last four to six months.

Right now, Dhaliwal said, there are bottlenecks throughout the system, including long waits to see specialists and an often ponderous process for obtaining necessary tests. In the future, tests will be bunched up as much as possible to streamline the process, he said.

Health executives know such streamlining is easier said than done in a vast system with many components.

But Dhaliwal said wait times are now simply too long. “We cannot accept that. The patients go through agony. And we want to take away those sleepless nights.”

Cook can relate to that.

When he was diagnosed with cancer while in university, his mother, who is from a First Nations community, thought it meant he was going to die.

“As much as this was my experience, it was my mom’s experience to have her 18-year-old son going through this,” Cook said. “I spent as much time trying to look after everyone else as myself.”

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca

The province’s plan

 

Guaranteeing an appointment with a specialist within two weeks or less from the time a general practitioner suspects cancer;

Developing a rapid diagnostic network that will co-ordinate and speed up testing;

Hiring advocates to help cancer patients and families cope with the process and to identify and resolve diagnosis and treatment delays;

Establishing a co-ordinating body that will ensure all parts of the health-care system are on board so system-wide changes can be made as quickly and efficiently as possible.

 

 

Cancer in Manitoba

 

Every year, more than 6,000 Manitobans are diagnosed with cancer.

Up to 10 times that number are suspected of having cancer and undergo testing to rule it out.

Like other jurisdictions, Manitoba is projecting a 50 per cent increase in cancer cases over the next 20 years.