Cancer care - Canada may hold key to perfection

INTERVIEWED yesterday Professor Tom Keane, interim director of the Cancer Control Programme, emphasised that the recent controversies over cancer services have led to a crisis of confidence that must be tackled.

When it comes to cancer mortality rates, we are well behind many other countries. But it is important that people should not be given unrealistic expectations,because this will make the rebuilding of confidence all the more difficult.

No system of cancer diagnosis is perfect. “Diagnosis even in the best centres in the world is problematic,” Prof Keane emphasised. It is not possible to get it right 100% of the time, but the best international standards do reach 95%, which is well above recent results in some of our hospitals.