In September 2009 I drew your attention to an interview between Gordon Brown and the Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, Harpal Kumar. In the interests of fairness, I thought I’d point out that Cancer Research UK have posted a similar interview with David Cameron called “David Cameron speaks exclusively to Cancer Research UK CEO Harpal Kumar“.
This is an election year so I think it is worth knowing what the main parties opinions on cancer, research and the NHS are.
Actually, the things that annoyed me in the interview with Gordon Brown came up again in the interview with David Cameron, namely that GP’s don’t know the symptoms of cancer and this is the whole reason the UK lags behind Europe in terms of cancer treatment and survival. I don NOT believe this is solely the GP’s fault, we need more people delivering care, more radiotherapists, for a start, more people to plan the very complex chemotherapy regimes, more people to administer these treatments and help people deal with the side effects. If GP’s referred everyone with a suspected cancer diagnosis the system would collapse because their simply aren’t enough specialists to deal with the numbers of people.
David Cameron puts more emphasis in the importance of public health to prevent cancers developing (not smoking/ eating healthily etc) and says he will set up local directors of public health to help achieve this. The trouble is these sort of things take decades before you see results so politically are very likely to be cut and scientifically it is very hard to judge how much good they do.
His response on funding research in universities is luke-warm, to say the least, given that university level research is facing huge cuts (see my post “We can afford to pay bankers but not scientists” for my views on that). In fact at first he talks about the need for more pharmacology clinicians. Is he even aware how much cancer research goes on in universities or does he think it all happens in hospitals?
What do you think? How do the two parties compare?
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