April Cancer Awareness Month a good time for concrete action
The Cancer Clinician Advocacy Forum (CCAF) has three concrete suggestions during Cancer Awareness Month in April for actions provincial and territorial health systems should take without delay to help clinicians provide care better for Canadians with cancer.
Members of CCAF are cancer clinicians, including nurses, pharmacists, and oncologists, helping Canadians face cancer every day. Fortunately, recent advances in knowledge and technology allow them to help many – while also seeing what could be done to make things better.
“We know our health systems face many challenges and demands that won’t be solved overnight, but we are proposing three practical actions that can and should be taken right away to help meet the needs of Canadians who are living with a cancer diagnosis,” said CCAF Co-Chair Dr. Sandeep Sehdev, a medical oncologist at the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre.
The three actions are the following:
ONE – Inter-provincial “free trade” in health services: Agree to better share across provincial and territorial boundaries – with a minimum of bureaucratic obstructions – the use of facilities and services to speed up access in all jurisdictions (particularly the smaller ones) to sophisticated diagnostic and molecular genetic testing for cancer.
As technology and skills become more specialized and expensive, jurisdictions need to share much more seamlessly to allow Canadians everywhere to benefit. Our 13 different health systems need to make it much easier to care for patients from different jurisdictions so someone in Yukon or Prince Edward Island can get the same quality of cancer care as someone in Alberta or Ontario.
TWO – Ease the administrative burden: Provinces and territories should undertake an urgent review, and take rapid follow-up action, to remove unnecessary processes and administrative obstacles that provide little or no value but take up precious time that clinicians could otherwise spend helping their patients.
Health professionals need relief. While there’s no doubt more health professionals are also needed, cutting bureaucracy and simplifying processes would be far faster, and cheaper, to bring much-needed assistance for current clinicians, better care to patients and improvements to wait times.
THREE – Faster access to new cancer therapies: Even after the many months it takes Health Canada to review and approve new cancer treatments, the government’s own figures show it then takes an average of another 628 days (21 months) for the mandatory economic evaluation and price negotiations. But even then, when a price has been agreed, it takes another three and a half months (107 days), on average, for public drug plans in each province to actually make the treatment available and that average hides some much longer delays in some provinces.
Governments should commit to a 30-day timeframe to make new cancer treatments available through public drug plans and for hospital use from the time a pricing agreement for a new medicine is reached with the pharmaceutical company.
About Cancer Clinician Advocacy Forum
CCAF emerged out of a two-day forum in Toronto in September 2023, which resulted in a formal report published in Current Oncology in February 2024, co-authored by 19 experts from across Canada. This report highlights the frustration clinicians experience due to lengthy delays in the approval and funding of optimal technologies and therapies for their patients. For more about CCAF, visit the website at cancerclinicianadvocacy.ca.