A Time to Act: Cancer care in Covid times – tackling the backlog

No-one has been untouched by COVID-19. Not only has COVID-19 affected economies, healthcare systems and changed families around the world forever, it has also caused a huge backlog in cancer care.

The European Cancer Organization (ECO) has recognized the urgent need to address this backlog, initiating the amazing campaign ‘Time to Act’, with a powerful central message: Don’t let COVID-19 stop you from tackling cancer. Gathering expertise from partners in industry, policy, healthcare and patient advocacy, ECO has drawn up a 7-point plan of action to address the challenges presented by COVID-19, with the ultimate goal of 'building back better’. Already 3 countries (Poland, Italy and Spain) launched the initiative and I hope more will follow.

For the past year, our healthcare providers were totally exhausted, and cancer specialists were drawn away to cover the intensive care needs of patients.?Patients living with cancer were sometimes too scared to go to hospital for fear of contracting COVID-19, and new patients didn’t want to ‘bother doctors’ during this time. Data gathered by ECO as part of its campaign, show that there could be one million cancer patients undiagnosed and delays in ongoing cancer treatment affected one in two patients throughout Europe in 2020.

The year has been tough for all of us, but ?even more for those ones with cancer.

It’s time to not give up.

Now more than ever, let’s all help our loved ones to go to that appointment, to fight for that diagnosis, to get the right treatment and go through their journey of beating cancer.

We all have a part to play in overcoming this unprecedented challenge, and I really hope that ?as we fought for COVID , we see our community come together and pull-through for the good of cancer patients and their families around the world.

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