Revealed: 100,000 wait more than two weeks to see cancer specialist

More than 100,000 patients a year are “having their worst fears dragged out” by having to wait longer than the stated maximum of two weeks to see a cancer specialist to find out if they have the disease, new NHS figures obtained by the Guardian reveal.

A total of 102,697 people in England did not get to see a consultant within 14 days of being urgently referred by their GP last year – a key patient right in the NHS constitution. Some 25,153 people had to wait more than the official target of 62 days to start their treatment.

Macmillan Cancer Support said growing delays to see a specialist, have a diagnostic test and start treatment meant that “thousands of people are being left in an appalling state of limbo”. The Royal College of Radiologists said it feared that long waits beyond the supposed maximums may also reduce patients’ chances of survival and risk some cancers becoming untreatable.

The findings are contained in an analysis of cancer waiting times performance in 2016 undertaken by the House of Commons Library at the request of the shadow health secretary, John Ashworth. “These statistics should be a badge of shame for Theresa May. It’s a national disgrace that this Tory government’s sustained failure to properly fund cancer services has left thousands of patients waiting longer than expected for treatment they urgently need,” he said.

Dr Nicola Strickland, the president of the Royal College of Radiologists, said: “Any delay in diagnosis or time to start therapy risks a growth in the cancer, potentially making it incurable. These delays increase the anxiety experienced by patients and their relatives at this difficult time.”

Diagnostic services’ difficulty in meeting demand means that 230,000 patients a year are also waiting more than a month for the results of X-rays and CT and MRI scans, she said. NHS cancer services are hobbled by chronic shortages of radiologists and clinical oncologists, she said.

The Commons research also breaks down the month-by-month performance by about 150 NHS hospital trusts and several private sector organisations which provide NHS-funded cancer services against the three main cancer targets. They specify that 93% of patients must see a specialist within 14 days of being referred for suspected cancer, 96% should have their first treatment inside 31 days and that 85% of those feared to have a new primary cancer should start treatment within 62 days.

“These targets exist for a reason. If cancers are caught early, survival rates improve. Behind every single one of these figures is a family having their worst fears dragged out for even longer,” said Dr Ann McMahon, the professional adviser to the Royal College of Nursing and Breast Care Nursing Forum.

The analysis shows that 25 out of 157 providers, almost one in six, failed to ensure that the required 93% of patients urgently referred by their GP last year saw a specialist within 14 days. The troubled Worcestershire Royal Acute Hospitals NHS trust recorded both the worst monthly performance – seeing just 39.4% of patients – and also the worst overall performance across the year against that standard, with only 74% of patients seen on time.

It provided 13,100 people with an appointment with a specialist within 14 days, but it failed to do so with 4,605 other patients, by far the largest number of any hospital trust or private firm. The Shrewsbury trust has been involved in controversy recently after two patients died in early January during the NHS’s worst winter crisis in years, reportedly after long waits on trolleys to get a bed. The Care Quality Commission said that month that safety standards were inadequate.

FEighty-six of of all 155 providers, or 55%, breached the 62-day target.

“A cancer diagnosis is a devastating, life-changing moment in many people’s lives. Every cancer patient should be given the comfort of knowing they were diagnosed and treated as quickly as possible, but as these data show, thousands of people are being left in an appalling state of limbo each year,” said Moira Fraser, Macmillan’s director of policy, public affairs and campaigns.

“Extended waits to start treatment can have a serious impact on someone’s mental wellbeing and we are concerned may ultimately harm someone’s long-term health outcomes.

“Unless you have been through it, it is impossible to imagine the stress and uncertainty of waiting for treatment, treatment you know could be the only chance for you or a loved one. We are seeing more and more referrals, which is to be welcomed, but investment in cancer services has not been keeping pace,” McMahon said.

A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “Cancer survival rates are actually now at a record high, and the NHS treated over 110,000 patients – 82% – within the target of 62 days last year, as the NHS rises to the challenge of an increase in urgent referrals for suspected cancer of over 90% compared to 2009/10.

“To build on this progress we have announced up to £300m a year to meet our new target for patients to be given a definitive diagnosis, or the all-clear, within 28 days of a GP referral‎.”

Revealed: 100,000 wait more than two weeks to see cancer specialist

Indonesia dismisses study showing forest fire haze killed more than 100,000 people

Indonesian, Malaysian and Singaporean authorities have dismissed research that suggested smoky haze from catastrophic forest fires in Indonesia last year caused 100,000 deaths. Some even contend the haze caused no serious health problems, but experts say those assertions contradict well-established science.

Last year’s fires in Sumatra and the Indonesian part of Borneo were the worst since 1997, burning about 261,000 hectares of forests and peatland and sending haze across the region for weeks. Many were deliberately set by companies to clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations.

The study in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Harvard and Columbia researchers estimated the amount of health-threatening fine particles, often referred to as PM2.5, released by the fires that burned from July to October and tracked their spread across south-east Asia using satellite observations.

In Indonesia, a spokesman for the country’s disaster mitigation agency said the research “could be baseless or they have the wrong information”. Indonesia officially counted 24 deaths from the haze including people killed fighting the fires.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health said short-term exposure to haze will generally not cause serious health problems. The study was “not reflective of the actual situation”, it said, and the overall death rate hadn’t changed last year.

In Malaysia, health minister Subramaniam Sathasivam said officials are still studying the research, which is “computer-generated, not based on hard data”. “People have died but to what extent the haze contributed to it, it’s hard to say,” he said. “If an 80-year-old fellow with high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problem and exposure to haze died, what did he die of? This is a hell of a difficult question to answer.”

The dry season fires are an annual irritant in Indonesia’s relations with its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia and the finding of a huge public health burden has the potential to worsen those strains. The 2015 burning season, which was worsened by El Niño’s dry conditions, also tainted Indonesia’s reputation globally by releasing a vast amount of atmosphere-warming carbon.

The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to prosecute companies and individuals who set fires and also strengthened its fire-fighting response. This year’s fires have affected a smaller area in large part due to unseasonal rains.

Jamal Hisham Hashim, research fellow with the International Institute for Global Health in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said governments should not dismiss the study even if the estimated deaths are arguable.

He said decades of air pollution research that followed London’s killer smog in 1952 has established the relationship between fine particulate matter and premature deaths, particularly in people with existing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

“The pollution level that occurred during the haze is severe enough to cause premature deaths. That is indisputable,” he said. “The study is a wake-up call. We need to be shaken; we have become too complacent with the haze.”

Joel Schwartz, an author of the study who is regarded by his peers as one of the world’s top experts on the health effects of air pollution, said authorities in the affected countries have not offered any details of how they reached conclusions critical of the study.

During the haze, Malaysia suffered air pollution at 10 times the level that the World Health Organization says causes premature deaths, he said, while Singapore’s claim that short-term exposure does not have serious effects is factually incorrect.
The Singaporean statement that its death rate was unchanged from 2014 did not demonstrate anything, Schwartz said, due to a worldwide trend for declining mortality. The study’s premise is that deaths are higher than what they would be without the haze rather than a comparison to a particular year, he said.

Separately, Singapore’s health ministry did not respond to a question on why heart disease and pneumonia, both of which can be brought to fatal conclusion by fine particle exposure, had increased as a percentage of deaths in 2015.

Malaysia, meanwhile, does not measure PM2.5 in its air pollution index but has been planning to from next year.

Half a dozen scientists with expertise in air pollution who reviewed the study for the Associated Press said its methodology was sound and its conclusions reasonable. Some cautioned that the estimates of 91,600 deaths in Indonesia, another 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore are invariably uncertain because aspects of the modelling rely on assumptions and the actual figures could be higher or lower.

The study considered only the health impact on adults and restricts itself to the effects of fine particles rather than all toxins that would be in the smoke.

Philip Hopke, director of the Center for Air Resources Engineering and Science at New York state’s Clarkson University, said air pollution studies have to overcome several challenges because “no one who gets sick or dies comes to the doctor or hospital with a clear label that says airborne particles or ozone did this.” Another problem is the studies typically assume that fine particles are the sole cause of illness or death but smoke from fires contains ozone and a variety of volatile compounds that would also affect health.

“A major event like occurred here is extremely likely to have caused adverse health outcomes in terms of both sickness and deaths,” he said.

Indonesia dismisses study showing forest fire haze killed more than 100,000 people

Google: 100,000 lives a year misplaced via worry of data-mining

Concern of information-mining of healthcare could be costing as a lot of as 100,000 lives a yr, according to Google’s Larry Web page.

Speaking out in response to fears in excess of his company’s vast haul of private details, Web page produced the case that not only is Google not going also far with collecting and analysing this kind of details – it really is not going far sufficient.

“For me, I’m so thrilled about the prospects to improve factors for folks, my be concerned would be the opposite,” he informed the New York Times’s Farhad Manjoo. “We get so concerned about these things that we really do not get the benefits … Correct now we do not information-mine healthcare information. If we did we’d probably save one hundred,000 lives subsequent 12 months.”

Webpage was speaking right after Google’s introductory keynote to its I/O developers conference, the place the company showed off a rehauled design for the 12th major release of Android, as nicely as its Android Wear operating program for smartwatches, and its third attempt to dominate the living space, Android Television.

The keynote closed with the introduction of Google Match, the company’s new fitness and wellness monitoring platform. With sensors on mobile gadgets, including Android Put on smart watches, users will be able to share well being Data with apps this kind of as weightloss programme Noom, which can keep track of weight, consuming routines and workout information to make recommendations that will increase your overall health. The platform is comparable in scope to the HealthKit attribute announced by Apple in early June.

“I believe technology is modifying people’s lives a lot, and we’re feeling it,” Web page told Manjoo. “In the early days of Street View, this was a huge issue, but it is not really a huge problem now. Men and women recognize it now and it’s quite helpful. And it doesn’t really modify your privacy that a lot. A lot of these items are like that.”

The I/O keynote was the focus of two separate protests, a single focusing on Google’s ownership of Boston Dynamics, a robotics business which is entangled in obligations to the US military’s R&ampD wing Darpa, and the second on the company’s function in the gentrification of San Francisco. But Sunder Pichai, Google’s head of Android, Chrome and Google Apps who led the presentation, was unperturbed.

“I feel in some approaches it’s very good that there is an open debate about it and I consider we needed it,” he informed the NYT. “There is been a great deal of development and the region is trying to adapt to that development and that has been a concern.”

Webpage concurred. “We’re in San Francisco, so we assume that. There’s a wealthy history of protest in San Francisco.”

• Google I/O 2014: smartwatches, Google Match – and Android Lollipop?

Google: 100,000 lives a year misplaced via worry of data-mining

App assisting to beat autism seeks £100,000 crowdfunding stimulus

Brain in Hand has all around 125 consumers, but the firm hopes to increase this to four,000. This week, it will make the app accessible to individuals, obtaining previously licensed it only for organisations.

David Fry, the chief executive of the four-12 months-previous business, explained despite the fact that the hospitals using the app have reported expense financial savings of £300 to £800 a week for every patient that uses it, Brain in Hand has struggled to win government assistance.

“We have identified as a little organization we have not attracted government funding at all. We have had to elbow our way into the discipline of health care. It is challenging to adjust the way the NHS performs,” he explained.

“Even now, assistance for individuals with autism can be patchy. There is a enormous need to have for one thing like this.”

Brain in Hand was founded by Andrew Stamp, whose younger son has autism. Mr Stamp teamed up with Dr Tony Brown, a clinical psychologist, to create the app out of aggravation with the good quality of regional services.

The app increases independence between men and women with autism by helping them handle day-to-day anxieties, which can swiftly escalate into debilitating crises with no help.

It performs by suggesting options to every day dilemmas. It also consists of a traffic light program that lets end users alert a “mentor” if they are feeling highly anxious, allowing the person to get in speak to and offer assistance quickly.

Mr Fry mentioned that numerous key organizations have been interested in licensing the app for employees with autism or Asperger’s Syndrome.

There are much more than 700,000 folks on the autistic spectrum in the United kingdom, and only 15pc of adults with the condition are in full-time paid operate, in accordance to the National Autistic Society.

App assisting to beat autism seeks £100,000 crowdfunding stimulus