Once suspected of having cancer patients then recieve orders to schedule more tests that tend to take days to set up, days to get results and more days to determine next steps, which then take more days to accomplish. I'd like to see a sort of advanced ambulance service, equipped to fast-track diagnosis and treatment, bypassing the beauracracy that gives fast-acting cancers time to get beyond treatement phase. Someone who has suspicions that something cancerous is loose in their systems would call a number and go to a cancer-911 mobile clinic which would speed them thru all the tests that normally take time to organize, reducing the interval between appointments from days to minutes. How to pay for this? Well there's the rub, but it seems to me that the decrease in days-lost would yield tangible, positive effects to the economy, society, the culture, etc not to mention the patients whose lives might be saved.
-- Steamboat, Mar 31 2006

When bureaucracy goes wrong... http://news.bbc.co....cotland/4691748.stm
Not what you want at the age of 15... [Jinbish, Mar 31 2006]

If the idea here is: let's do diagnostic workups faster, it will be better, it seems to me at best a nonidea, and at worst a borderline rant. My sympathies, though, if you are having frustrations dealing with an ineffective healthcare bureaucracy.
-- bungston, Mar 31 2006


In my part of the world, there have been average waiting times of something like 100 days for cancer patients between diagnosis and treatment. I know someone that was, thankfully operated on within a week of diagnosis, with chemo and radio follwing about a month after. I wholly support the idea for a faster service...

But I don't know whether such a 'fast-track' is feasible. There are many conditions that require fast treatment. As for the bureaucracy - it seems to pervade governmental behemoths such as the NHS in the UK. But with the treatment of cancer, you can't be too sure about what to do - chemo and radio are not to be trifled with. I mean one has its roots in WWI mustard gas and the other is high power bloody x-rays.

On saying that - the linky shows that no matter the bureaucracic levels, there are always mistakes...
-- Jinbish, Mar 31 2006



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