Dai Havard

Labour Party | Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney

Oncology Supplement – The House Magazine

If You Think You’re Tired!

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has just issued a final decision on using erythropoietin (EPO) for treatment induced anaemia in cancer patients. I have a high incidence of cancer in my constituency and I have been campaigning for better standards and modern treatments. One aspect of care must be to deal with the anaemia associated with treatment and the debilitating affects it can have. In patient surveys Anaemia induced fatigue is reported as the most socially debilitating aspect of cancer care, greater than pain and nausea!

Giving blood transfusions is the routine. It is not just costly but is not always the best treatment, neither is it the safest or most efficient. At a time when health care is being directed toward treatment in the community and at home, it is frankly crazy to me that there is the resistance, inability or unwillingness, to see both the quality of life benefit but also the efficiency of using drug based alternatives, to the potentially less safe and less efficient process of transfusion. Transfusions are the exception in the USA and in most other countries in Europe. If we are to truly bring standards and quality of care for cancer patients up to European standards then this wrong decision by NICE must be overturned through the appeal process, currently underway.

Clinicians and health economists must catch up with treatment regimens that recognise cancer has already emerged as a chronic and long-term illness rather than being an acute disease from which many very quickly die. That is a testament to clinicians and modern practices. Why then do they resist the same approach to anaemia? EPO is seen as an, apparently, more costly treatment for a palliative not curative aspect of care. This view is narrow and strikes at the heart of the problem. They seem unable to account for the true cost of care and the ‘rationing’ process vested in NICE can not either. They can not see the real benefit of a set of treatments to society as well as individuals. Cancer patients can be helped to stay in work if they can mange their anaemia. The extra costs of drugs are offset by better use of hospital resources and the quality of cancer patient’s lives and that of their families improved. The list of benefits goes on but the resistance remains. Cancer touches one in three of us and I hope my colleagues will join me in using the use of EPO to draw out the real benefits of using prescription policy to drive real efficiency into the health service, as well as doing the right thing for cancer patients and their families.