Nearly one million Italians with
cancer diagnoses seek medical treatment outside of their regions
each year at a reported two-billion-euro cost, Italy's
Federation of Assocations of Volunteers (FAVO) said Thursday.
Presenting its 6th annual report in Rome on Thursday's
National Day of Cancer Patients, FAVO reported on "Journeys of
Hope", where ten of thousands of patients from primarily
southern regions such as Campania, Calabria and Sicily are
traveling to northern regions for better care and treatment.
Patients are choosing to leave their cancer treatment
centers in their regions due to waiting lists and lack of
necessary facilities, the report stated.
"The tools to improve the situation exist but are not yet
applied", said FAVO President Francesco De Lorenzo, adding that
the European Union's National Cancer Plan established in
2011-2012 has not "yet been realized".
Socioeconomic research institute CENSIS underlined the
disparate situation where quality of life may be "good" as in
the case of 42% of colon cancer patient surveyed, while only 9%
of the same patients considered rehabilitation services
"sufficient".
Emilia Grazia di Blasi, chair of the Senate health
committee, said "How can we present ourselves to Europe when we
have endless waiting lists, delays in access to medicines and an
archaic relationship between hospitals and territories?"
The report also noted an additional concern regarding
fertility.
Preservation techniques are available to only a small
percentage of cancer patients, and more often than not, patients
are given zero information about fertility possibilities.
"The possibility to preserve fertility is one more
incentive for a patient to try to get better", said Elisabetta
Iannelli, FAVO secretary, "and the numbers (of patients) are low
and don't constitute a high cost but the ethical value is
important".
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