As part of their On the Ball campaign, Sarcoma UK has tweeted two astonishing statistics:
- Only one in four of sarcoma referrals are to a specialist centre.
- Sarcoma patients wait on average 1½ years for referral.
I find those numbers terrifying and so I applaud Sarcoma UK’s efforts to dramatically improve them. In their strategy for 2014 – 2020 Transforming the landscape for sarcoma they have two targets to deal with this:
- 100% of people diagnosed with sarcoma will be treated under the care of a sarcoma multi-disciplinary team (compared to only 60% in 2013) (page 19).
- 80% of people with suspected sarcoma will be referred to hospital for further investigations on their first or second visit to their GP (compared to 2013 where one third of sarcoma patients visit their GP three times or more before referral) (page 15).