Wait for ovarian cancer care longer in UK than other rich nations

Only 59.3% of patients received chemotherapy for ovarian cancer in England compared with 75% in areas of Canada, according to the study by the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP).

The UK was also much slower in diagnosing ovarian cancer than health services in Norway, Canada and Australia, and older women were much less likely to receive chemotherapy.

The findings underline the urgency of devising a new national cancer plan, which the health secretary, Wes Streeting, has promised will be published in the autumn. The plan should set out measures on prevention, early diagnosis and treatment. NHS England has not met its target to have 85% of patients waiting a maximum of 62 days from referral to treatment since 2015. The latest figure is 69.2%.

John Butler, lead clinical adviser for the ICBP and an NHS surgeon in London, said overall survival rates were improving in the NHS, “but we’re about 15 years behind other leading countries”.

The study, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology and supported by Cancer Research UK, examined the cases of 39,879 patients diagnosed between 2012 and 2017 in Australia, Canada, Norway and the UK.

In Norway, 46% of women were still alive five years after being diagnosed. In Scotland, the five-year survival rate was 34%, while in Wales and Northern Ireland it was 35% and in England 38%.

Staff shortages in GP surgeries and fewer scanners are part of the problem, Butler said. Symptoms can also be vague, with women sometimes having a bloated stomach, feeling full unusually quickly or experiencing tiredness. Since it is also unusual for GPs to see women with ovarian cancer, access to scanners is vital to avoid misdiagnosis.

Butler saidhe saw women “every week” who said they had made multiple visits to GPs before being diagnosed. “I had a patient who died recently who was 28. She visited nine different GPs with symptoms and it’s only when she ended up in A&E that she had a scan and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.”

. A previous study by the ICBP, which gave identical scenarios to GPs in different countries, found that primary care doctors in the UK were much less likely to refer patients for investigations than high-performing jurisdictions such as Australia. Norva Abiona was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2010 aged 34. She thought she was pregnant. “It’s like something was growing inside you but my tummy was growing a bit too quick,” she said.

Her doctors were unsympathetic. “One doctor told me unless I come in collapsed, heavily bleeding or something else, that I don’t have an emergency.”

Eventually, she went to A&E and had a CT scan. Further scans revealed the tumour was 15cm and Abiona had surgery three weeks later. Afterwards, she had two courses of chemotherapy but had to stop treatment because of its severe side-effects.

Six months later, doctors ordered another scan after some suspicious test results. “The doctor said: ‘Just before you go for the MRI scan, do an ultrasound first.’ And when they did, it turned out I was pregnant,” Abiona said. Now she has three daughters and is still cancer-free.

“I know some people who did not make it. [People who] can’t walk. I am one of the really blessed and fortunate people to come out and still have a positive story.”

Photograph by Carlos Duarte/Getty Images.