Over 3,500 patients wait three months for bowel cancer test

Colonoscopy waiting times highlight the gap between the State’s public and private health systems where tests take more than three months and 12 days respectively, the Irish Cancer Society has said.

It said some of the 3,510 public patients currently awaiting such a test, which helps detect bowel cancer, will have a cancer that may have advanced because diagnosis was delayed.

The number of patients waiting three months of more for the test peaked in October at 4,235, an increase of 954 people on the same time last year, before falling by the end of November.

The waiting times are unacceptable, the society added.

The consequence of a person waiting more than three months for a colonoscopy could be that if they have bowel cancer, it may be diagnosed at a later stage. This means that there may be fewer treatment options available than if it had been caught earlier and the treatment prescribed could be more invasive. The survival rates also decrease the later the stage of the cancer at diagnosis.

“The Irish Cancer Society is deeply concerned by the large number of people waiting longer than three months for a colonoscopy,” the society said. “The HSE is a long way off meeting its target of performing 100 per cent of colonoscopies within 13 weeks.

“Currently, 41 per cent of patients are waiting longer than three months for the cancer test. The tragic reality is that we can expect some colorectal [bowel] cancers to be diagnosed when the patients on waiting lists eventually receive their colonoscopy.”

The organisation’s head of advocacy Kathleen O’Meara added that long-term solutions were required to solve the ongoing issues and called for investment to ensure enough radiographers and gastroenterologists were working in Irish hospitals.

“We also want GPs to have clear guidelines for when they should refer a patient for a colonoscopy and when another investigation is better suited,” she said.

“Additionally, we are hopeful that hospitals working within the same hospital group will co-ordinate their colonoscopy workloads so that a situation where endoscopy suites in one hospital are under-utilised while a hospital in the same group is overburdened, is avoided.”

The November waiting list figures show an overall drop of 725 patients in the past month. “It is certainly a move in the right direction but given no one should be waiting more than 13 weeks and the fact that there are still 3,510 public patients waiting more than this time, the drop needs to continue and the underlying problem solved,” Ms O’Meara said.

Separately, research from the Lancet Oncology shows the price of new cancer drugs varies by 28 per cent to 388 per cent between high-income countries in Europe and Oceania .

The study reveals that overall the UK and Mediterranean countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal pay the lowest average unit manufacturer prices for a group of 31 originator cancer drugs (new drugs under patent), whereas Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany pay the highest prices.

Researchers said they noted rather low data availability in Ireland (missing data for eight drugs) while countries such as Denmark, Finland, Germany and Sweden had data available for all 31 drugs surveyed.