Testicular Cancer: Expert details main sign and symptoms

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The UK is facing a devastating cancer crisis. A damning report by the National Audit Office (NAO) this week found that as many as 740,000 patients missed urgent GP referrals for suspected cancer since the beginning of the first coronavirus lockdown. The report also warned that there is a “real risk” that waiting lists for patients seeking elective care could get worse. In September, the NHS elective care waiting list had 5.83 million patients on it, the NAO warned this could reach 12 million by 2025.

The report comes just days after Macmillan Cancer Support estimated 47,000 people in the UK are “missing” a cancer diagnosis.

That figure would almost fill Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium — an entire football stadium full of people who have cancer but don’t know it.

Thousands more after facing long delays and they go through the treatment process.

Dr Jodie Moffat, head of strategic evidence and early diagnosis programme lead at Cancer Research UK, told Express.co.uk that urgent referrals “fell off the cliff” at the end of March 2020 when the country went into lockdown.

Dr Moffat said that things started to “pick up” again a while later, but at different rates.

Breast cancer, she said, picked up “pretty quickly”. Urological cancers, such as prostate cancer, and lung cancer, were quite slow at picking up again.

Prostate cancer cases are down 23 percent, while breast cancer is down 12 percent.

Heartbreakingly, the UK’s poor cancer survival rates are showing no signs of improving.

Dr Moffat cited the lack of face-to-face GP appointments as part of the reason behind the issues.

She said: “Those urine dip tests that you might do, depending on what a patient was reporting to you, if you’re not doing that, then you won’t be spotting those hidden traces of blood in pee.”

She also noted capacity issues and GP’s “shifting their thresholds accordingly”, as well as people not coming forwards, all of which affect the early stages of the cancer pathway.

Dr Moffat said it “is a crisis we’ve not seen in cancer certainly for the time I’ve been working”.

She added: “It’s a huge cancer crisis and we are really fearful that cancer survival could go backwards. We are fearful about coming into winter and what that could mean for cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

Before the pandemic, Britain was sitting at the bottom of the international cancer league tables.

Research over a 20-year period, published by the World Health Organisation in 2019, compared seven major nations, with the UK’s survival rates the lowest for five out of seven common cancers.

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Since the pandemic struck, patients have been reluctant to come forward, wanting to “protect the NHS”, while evidence shows people are also fearful of catching Covid in hospital environments.

Dr Moffat stressed: “It’s a crisis of a scale I’ve not seen before, and we don’t want to go backwards, we already have cancer outcomes that don’t compare to the best in the world.

“This really does risk us going further behind.”

She continued: “We’ve got a situation here where lives are at stake so people may be in life or death situations because of the delays in their diagnosis or the delays in their treatment.”

People’s quality of life will also be affected by a later diagnosis.

Dr Moffat explained: “They might need more invasive treatments that bring them long term side effects that they might not have needed if they had had their cancer diagnosed at an early stage.”

For some people, the stage at which they are diagnosed could be the difference between life and death.

Dr Moffat and her colleagues have stressed “cancer can’t wait”. 

She said: “The public, understandably, see time of the essence when it comes to heart attack and stroke. 

“And that’s absolutely right. Hours make a difference for those diseases. 

“But for cancer, time really does matter, too. And we really don’t want people to be thinking that it’s okay to keep symptoms to themselves. But also, it’s not okay for the Government to let the NHS get into a position where it can’t deliver diagnosis and treatment rapidly.”

Cancer does not discriminate, nor does it wait around. 

Dr Moffat said “chronic underinvestment”, “an element of head in the sand” as well as “the Government taking its eye off the ball with regards to planning” have all contributed to the crisis. 

This was echoed by Professor Pat Price, co-founder of the #CatchUpWithCancer Campaign, in the wake of the NAO report.

She said in a statement: “Cancer services in certain areas are on life support and failure to act will only lead to an unmitigated disaster because every four weeks of delay can mean a 10 percent reduction in cancer survival.

“We need the Government to urgently outline how additional funding will be spent on cancer treatments, backlog busting technologies, like radiotherapy, and the cancer workforce.

“Cancer patients don’t have the luxury of time, if we don’t act more people will die at home who don’t need to.”

Health Secretary Sajid Javid confirmed in October that the 40 “one-stop shops” would be launched in the next six months as part of attempts to detect cancer sooner.

Blood tests, MRI and CT scans will all be carried out in shopping centres and football stadiums every day, helping to speed up both diagnosis and treatment times.

Ministers have also promised a 15-year plan to tackle the challenge of training and recruiting for cancer services amid ongoing staff shortages. Numbers had been approaching crisis levels prior to the pandemic, but the levels are worse than ever now.

These plans will be published in the spring.

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