Access to cancer care “remains unequal across the country” for adults, highlights the National Academy of Medicine in a 26-page report made public on Monday, November 18, where it presents a series of proposals to try to remedy this situation. .
Cancers remain the leading cause of premature mortality in France among men, the second among women, and their frequency has doubled in about thirty years, with more than 433,000 new cases in mainland France in 2023.
The Academy considers that “the current state of diagnostic and therapeutic care does not seem homogeneous throughout the territory, nor does access to innovative practices.”
And this, “despite considerable advances in the field of treatments (robotic surgery, high-precision radiotherapy, targeted medical treatments and immunotherapy, supportive care, etc.) and diagnosis (molecular and genetic pathology).”
A “Pink October” campaign without much effect
“These inequalities in access have perhaps increased in recent years post-Covid, due to the economic and human resource difficulties encountered in community medicine and hospitals,” the report’s authors add.
Despite a highly structured organization of oncology, difficulties and territorial inequalities persist “across the entire healthcare path,” warns the Academy of Medicine.
Prevention policies are therefore considered “too general, insufficiently funded, poorly evaluated, and of little concern to populations at risk for economic or sociocultural reasons.”
The famous “Pink October” for breast cancer detection is criticized for not having led to “an increase in the number of screening mammograms.”
“It would undoubtedly have been preferable to carry out a precise evaluation of this mobilization and better identify unexamined women to raise awareness,” according to the report.
A series of recommendations
For this reason, the Academy of Medicine recommends “precisely guiding and evaluating prevention policies” for cancer, but also “an active prevention policy” for cured patients but with a high risk of complications and premature death.
Although the genomic characteristic of tumors is “indispensable”, the report also advocates for “maximum interaction” between two categories of analysts, anatomopathologists and molecular biologists. It also aims to replace molecular tests on a single gene with tests on groups of genes to avoid a “loss of opportunities” for patients.
The Academy also defends “a homogenization of prices between public and private actors, and not weakening locoregional cancer treatments,” which act directly on the tumor or the region of the tumor.
Finally, it calls for a policy to encourage careers in oncology because otherwise the shortage of caregivers could increase inequalities in access or even mortality.
Source: BFM TV
