Disparities in treatment of lung cancer patients

Recent research suggests disparities in treatment across English could be resulting in hundreds of lung cancer patients dying early each year.

Christian Beadell, a senior solicitor within our medical negligence department, commented on the news, “This review is based on a large study group and it’s findings need to be taken seriously. It will be of immense concern to patients that there is such a significant disparity between survival rates at different Trusts. It is hard to understand how this can arise if all Trusts are adopting an evidence based approach in line with NICE (National Institute for Clinical Excellence) guidance. The Trusts that adopted a more proactive and aggressive treatment plan were associated with better survival rates. Whilst this would seem to be a fairly obvious conclusion, it will be interesting to see if the differing approaches are due to variance in local Protocols or simply rationing decisions based on funding.

As patients are rarely aware of the approach that their Trust adopts, it will be interesting to see if this report leads to an increasing number of requests for out of area referrals by patients who understandably would want to be treated by a Trust showing better survival rates.”

You can read the full article here.