Better value cancer care for the 21st century
Cet article plaide pour une meilleure prise en compte des coûts associés aux traitements et à l'organisation des soins liés au cancer dans les pays européens
The last two decades have seen steady improvements in the quality of cancer care. We have embraced multidisciplinary team working, site specialised by focussing expertise on specific cancer subtypes, increased the power, reliability and quality of the clinical trials which underpin our evidence base, and taken this forward into the production of practical management guidelines. The EuroCare studies, published in this Journal [ 1], have shown a trend of increasing survival, which has been attributed to earlier detection and better treatment. There is wide variation in outcomes when we compare international mortality figures but no clear explanation to account for this disparity, although there have been speculative claims correlating survival with access to new drugs and radiotherapy equipment, or the number of oncologists, or the overall cancer spend [ 2]. It has been estimated that if we could improve UK’s cancer survival figures to those of European leaders, say Sweden, thousands of lives would be saved every year—quite a prize for any health economy.
Annals of Oncology 2011