NHS kills more paying customers

How comfortable to sit somewhere in a big bureaucracy, invisible and therefore unaccountable.

The UK lags behind the US and the rest of Europe in introducing newer, more targeted types of radiotherapy, reported The Telegraph last week.

Today's page 2 news doesn't show up online yet, but reports that "tens of thousands of cancer patients are missing out on the latest radiotherapy treatments".

Many centres have machines that can deliver the latest treatments but are using them to give radiotherapy that is considered old fashioned.

"Of 41,421 patients who would have benefited from intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) only 9,775 actually got it."

Radiotherapy centres had predicted that by this year 90% of patients would be receiving IMRT, but this is unlikely to be met. Prof Karol Sikora says that:

In many instances we have the technology but we don't have people who are trained to use it or there are other issues like the machine has not been equipped with the correct computer software.

To avoid being killed by the health service they have paid for through their taxes, patients are being forced to go private or go abroad to be treated.

Patients on the continent are twice as likely as those in Britain to receive the newest treatments, and "the gap between the UK and leading EU countries such as France and Germany" is growing.

Prof Sir Mike Richards bleats that the NHS is "planning ways to boost services to meet the needs of future cancer patients". But he and the NHS are failing now.

Against this background, we can only hope that yesterday's report for the Southend Echo by Katy Islip is wrong: she says that Southend Hospital "is the first in the UK to use intensity modulated radiation therapy, known as IMRT". She adds that

The care offered is soon to get even more sophisticated after the hospital used charitable donations (my italics) to invest in volume moderated arc therapy, which allows the machine delivering treatment to rotate around the patient. This will shrink treatment time from 15 minutes to just two minutes.

Meanwhile, does a hospital near you have such a machine, bought and paid for by you, which they aren't using properly?

Once again, the comfortable NHS is killing paying customers through neglect, without accountability.

A private provider wouldn't get away with this: if they don't offer the treatment they won't get paid for it. And they're certainly unlikely allow a manager to let an expensive new machine sit unused for lack of software or trained operators.