A DOZEN top cancer specialists have urged the Scottish Government to drop its focus on waiting-time targets for treatment, saying they are placing audit staff under "excessive" pressure.
The senior medics complain that the pressure to submit weekly progress reports on waiting times is adversely affecting the vital work of auditing patient treatment.
The claims are made in the latest edition of the Scottish Medical Journal, and sig
ned by 12 lead clinicians in the West of Scotland Managed Clinical Networks for Adult Cancers.
The specialists firstly warn that the 62-day target for cancer treatment does not reflect the various ways different cancers need to be approached.
The editorial states: "The term 'cancer' covers a wide range of conditions with variable presentations, variable rates of biological progression and varying complexities of diagnosis and treatment.
"For patients with squamous carcinoma of lung and a potential doubling time of less than two weeks, a 62-day target is clearly inappropriate."
The clinicians concede that there is "much to celebrate" in the form of the service developments that have stemmed from the waiting times initiative, and praise improvements in staffing, imaging facilities, diagnostic services and equipment.
But the article states: "The initiative… does not provide the most appropriate measure of cancer care and has serious flaws, particularly in the damage it has done to clinical audit of treatment and outcome.
Now is the time to refocus attention to quality of care and clinical audit rather than waiting times."
The medics argue the effective clinical audit of cancer treatment and outcome is the most important way in which they can assess the quality of service.
Dr Ted Fitzsimons, lead specialist in blood cancers at Gartnavel Hospital, was one of the 12 who put their names to the article.
He said he hoped the article would be "helpful".
"It's written by clinicians who are actively managing patients with cancer and these are our clinical concerns," he said today.
A Government spokesman said they were prepared to listen to the concerns.
But he added that what causes the most concern for patients was the wait for treatment.
He said the collecting of data "tells us where patients are in the system, and that's a reasonable thing to want to know".
The full article contains 383 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
