Clinicians say red tape and patchwork access keep cancer patients waiting longer than necessary
Cancer patients in smaller provinces can wait far longer for the same tests and drugs people get in big-city centres—delays cancer clinicians say governments could fix much faster if they chose to.
Members of the Cancer Clinician Advocacy Forum (CCAF) – nurses, pharmacists and oncologists who treat Canadians with cancer every day – are pressing provinces and territories to act on three concrete steps, starting with how they share services, manage paperwork and approve new therapies.
They argue that recent advances in cancer knowledge and technology only translate into better outcomes if systems remove avoidable barriers.
CCAF co-chair Sandeep Sehdev, a medical oncologist at the Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre, said “we know our health systems face many challenges and demands that won’t be solved overnight.”
He said the coalition is proposing three immediate, “practical actions” to help meet the needs of Canadians living with cancer.
CCAF points to long delays between Health Canada approval of a cancer medicine and the point when patients can actually receive it through public plans.
After the federal review, the forum notes that the mandatory economic evaluation and price negotiations add an average of 628 days, or about 21 months.
Even once a price is set, public drug plans in each province take another three and a half months on average—107 days—to list the treatment, with some provinces taking much longer.
CCAF is calling on governments to commit to a 30-day timeframe for new cancer medicines to become available through public drug plans and for hospital use from the moment a pricing agreement is reached with the pharmaceutical company.
The forum also wants what it calls inter-provincial “free trade” in health services to smooth out regional gaps in access to high-end diagnostics.
Under this proposal, provinces, and territories would agree to share facilities and services across borders, with a minimum of bureaucratic obstructions, so patients in all jurisdictions—particularly smaller ones—could get faster access to sophisticated diagnostic and molecular genetic testing for cancer.
CCAF argues that as technology and skills become more specialized and expensive, the 13 different health systems need to share “much more seamlessly” so Canadians everywhere benefit.
The goal is 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.
The third priority focuses on easing the administrative burden on health professionals.
CCAF urges provinces and territories to start an urgent review of processes and administrative obstacles that provide little or no value but consume clinicians’ time, followed by rapid action to remove them.
The group stresses that this time could instead go to direct patient care.
Health professionals “need relief.”
While more staff are clearly required, CCAF says cutting bureaucracy and simplifying processes would be a far faster and cheaper way to support current clinicians, improve patient care and help reduce wait times.
