Surgeon's warning over deadly delays in NHS cancer care

Scotland is facing a cancer timebomb, with a post-pandemic surge in cases just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, a surgeon has warned.

Growing numbers of patients are coming forward late after holding off reporting symptoms during Covid, Professor Farhat Din said yesterday.

But, alarmingly, there are not enough staff to deal with all the GP referrals.

Professor Din, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, also called for a full review into the soaring number of cancelled operations, saying the problem was taking a toll on patients’ mental and physical health.

Her comments came on a day of more damning figures about the pressure on the NHS, including:

n Nearly 2,000 operations didn’t go ahead in April, including 426 which were cancelled for ‘non-clinical capacity reasons’;

n The average number of NHS beds lost to delayed discharge soared to 1,914 in April, and the average delay is now 28 days;

n A third of patients are not being seen in A&E within the four-hour target, and long waits have soared.

Professor Din, a Cancer Research UK clinical scientist, told Holyrood’s health committee: ‘We don’t have enough staff to see patients in secondary care, in terms of the demand from referrals from primary care. That’s a very straightforward fact.

‘We know patients are waiting longer for their investigations and longer for access to surgery.’

She said clinicians were having ‘very difficult’ conversations about waits for diagnostic scans, while medical staff were suffering stress due to being unable to ‘deliver the high standard of care we’ve been trained to do’. 

Referring to the Covid delay, Professor Din said: ‘We are only starting to see the tip of the iceberg in terms of patients that have not come forward.

‘Coupled with that a pause in screening, a pause in pretty much all diagnostics, there is a huge backlog and we won’t really know what the magnitude of the unmet need is.’

Peter Hastie, of Macmillan Cancer Support, told MSPs: ‘The existing cancer waiting times target has not been hit for 12 years.

‘That is really, really difficult for cancer patients.’ Noting that the performance against the 62-day target has been ‘getting worse every year’, he added: ‘It is a really strong indicator something is badly wrong in cancer services.’

Public Health Scotland figures yesterday showed that of 23,482 operations planned in April 2024, 1,943 were cancelled on the day before or on the day itself.

An average of 1,914 beds were occupied due to delayed discharge in April and only 67.4 per cent of patients were seen at A&E within four hours.

The proportion waiting more than 12 hours jumped from 4.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent in a month, while the number waiting more than eight hours increased from 11.2 to 11.7 per cent. 

Scottish Tory health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane branded the figures ‘atrocious’, while his Scottish Labour counterpart Jackie Baillie said the SNP ‘should be apologising… for the damage they have done through their incompetence and mismanagement’.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘We are treating more cancer patients on time, within both 62 and 31-day pathways, compared to pre-pandemic and ten years ago. We are determined to reduce waits and are investing £40million in cancer services.’