Cancer innovation is saving lives – but NHS is struggling to meet rising demands
“The moment you have it yourself you hear it everywhere, but for something so prevalent it’s not talked about at all,” says Patrick Keane. His right arm is plugged into a tube that runs up to a bag of clear liquid in a treatment room at the Royal Free Hospital in north London, one of the UK’s largest cancer treatment centres.
The 56-year-old’s future is dependent on the slow drip of chemicals that attack the cancer cells in his body. If the tumour in his bowel can be reduced by chemotherapy, it can then be more easily surgically removed.
Returning to duties last week after his own diagnosis, the King chose to highlight innovations in cancer research and the thousands who like him are living under the shadow of the disease.
Patrick is one. Indeed, he got his cancer diagnosis in late January, around the same time as the King, and he is taking part in an innovative clinical trial that may help future patients.
Patrick Keane is taking part in an innovative clinical trial that may help future patients
In this election year, charities are calling on political parties to produce long-term plans for tackling the disease as part of their manifesto pledges. While innovation is saving lives, there is a looming budget shortfall.
Cancer Research UK, to whom the King became patron last week, estimates there will be a £1bn gap in research funding within the next decade. This is in part due to inflation combined with the cost of living crisis impacting donations to cancer charities.
Add to this that the number of us getting cancer is increasing, projected to go up by a fifth by 2040.
The Royal Free London NHS Trust, which receives the highest number of cancer referrals in London at 50,000 a year, has seen a 10,000 increase in referrals since 2019.
It’s no surprise then that the NHS is missing targets for waiting times between urgent GP referrals and treatment.
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One in two of us will get cancer and, as Patrick knows too well, that word opens up a world of uncertainty. “The word carries so much baggage with it,” he says, and having it can send your mind to “some pretty dark places”.
He talks frankly about the treatment and its side effects, which after his first two rounds, have been minimal. “I didn’t have much of a head of hair to begin with,” he jokes.
Some of his hair has gone in patches, but asked what the hardest thing has been, he doesn’t hesitate: “My father passed away when I was 14. He died of cancer. I have 13-year-old twins so I couldn’t initially shift the thought – is this going to happen again? Passing 48, the age that my father died was a key milestone for me. My children being older than I was when my father passed away was another one.
“Nobody expects their dad to die. It’s a very unreal concept, and I’m not dying – but to try to have that conversation you know – ‘things will be fine.’ It’s very treatable.”
Two weeks after his third round of chemo, scans show the treatment has done its job, Patrick’s surgery can go ahead and is due to happen later this month.
Roopinder Gillmore, lead cancer physician at the Royal Free
More survive cancer as technology advances
Cancer is more treatable now. More of us are surviving it because technology is advancing.
At the Royal Free that ranges from a new cutting-edge £8m PET scanner, which offers a faster more accurate diagnosis, to new drugs offering greater survival chances.
Lead cancer physician at the Royal Free, Roopinder Gillmore, told Sky News: “We are doing surgery quicker, more keyhole robotic surgery in this hospital. We do liver transplants for patients with primary liver cancer, we’re trialling that out in other cancer types which is really exciting.
“We are doing more specialised radiotherapy and for me, my thing is drug treatments, and they are exponentially increasing in terms of what we can offer our patients. The big thing is immunotherapy, we didn’t have that 15 years ago. It has completely changed the outlook for people with lung cancer and skin cancer.”
Backlogs and waiting times have increased
But for all the advances, backlogs and waiting times have built up since the pandemic. The latest NHS figures show 64% of patients received their first treatment within 62 days of an urgent GP referral. The target is 85%.
That stretch on resources has a knock-on impact on patients like 29-year-old Beaux Harris.
Beaux, an actor and dancer who teaches at The Manor Dance Studio in north London, has what is called a mutated BRCA1 gene, which means her chances of getting cancer dramatically increase in her 30s.
She has a 60% chance of getting ovarian cancer and a 90% chance of getting breast cancer.
So she has decided to get a preventative double mastectomy and a hysterectomy but, due to the backlog, she has a long wait.
Beaux Harris has a mutated gene which means her chances of getting cancer dramatically increase in her 30s
‘I feel like I’ve got a ticking time bomb on me’
She says: “I feel like I’ve got a ticking time bomb on me – and it is terrifying. The truth is it doesn’t really feel like a choice when you are presented with a figure like that – it’s like saying would you get on a plane with a 90% chance of it crashing? I know I wouldn’t.”
She has been told that waiting times on the NHS for her preventative treatment is two years at the earliest.
She says people on her online support groups have waited five years. She’s also been told there’s a high chance the operation could be cancelled at the last minute if a high-demand cancer patient needs the slot.
“I could get timed out,” she says. So, she is crowdfunding to get the £50,000 plus she needs to go private.
‘I would love to be worrying about things that every other 29-year-old is worrying about’
She might need more funds if she wants some sort of normality at the end of it.
She says: “If I have a hysterectomy now, I can’t have children. So, I’m also trying to raise money to freeze my eggs. Something that is offered on the NHS to cancer patients, but not to BRCA patients.”
She certainly doesn’t want to wait until she gets cancer. Ovarian cancer is known as the silent killer due to the difficulty in early detection.
Beaux’s grandmother, her mother, and her aunt all died of cancer because of the BRCA1 mutated gene, she hopes to be the first female in her family in generations to survive having it.
“I would love to be worrying about things that every other 29-year-old is worrying about,” she says. “I’ve got some bloody Olivia awards to win!”
Indeed, Beaux is using her talents putting on performances and doing tap dance sessions to raise money for her treatment.
In some ways it is taken for granted that, because it touches so many of us, most of the money raised for cancer research in this country comes from the British public, but charities say the government needs to play a bigger role in ensuring the UK continues to innovate and improve treatment for what remains the defining health issue of our time.
A nine-year-old girl found dead in Weston-super-Mare has been named on the day police revealed a teenager had been charged with her murder.
Emergency services were called to Lime Close in the Somerset town at 6.09pm on Monday but Aria Thorpe was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police said a 15-year-old boy had been charged with her murder and that a preliminary post-mortem found she died from a single stab wound.
The teenage boy – who can’t be named due to his age – will appear at Bristol Magistrates’ Court later today.
A police cordon remains in place as forensics officers continue their work.
Flowers and tributes have been left at the scene. Pic: PA
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Superintendent Jen Appleford, from Avon and Somerset Police, said the community was in shock and Aria’s family were being supported by police.
“It is impossible to adequately describe how traumatic the past 36 hours have been for them and we’d like to reiterate in the strongest possible terms their request for privacy,” she said.
Supt Appleford said police were working with local schools and other agencies to make sure support is available.
Britain loves chocolate.
We’re estimated to consume 8.2kg each every year, a good chunk of it at Christmas, but the cost of that everyday luxury habit has been rising fast.
Whitakers have been making chocolate in Skipton in North Yorkshire for 135 years, but they have never experienced price pressures as extreme as those in the last five.
“We buy liquid chocolate and since 2023, the price of our chocolate has doubled,” explains William Whitaker, the real-life Willy Wonka and the fourth generation of the family to run the business.
William Whitaker, managing director of the company
“It could have been worse. If we hadn’t been contracted [with a supplier], it would have trebled.
“That represents a £5,000 per-tonne increase, and we use a thousand tonnes a year. And we only sell £12-£13m of product, so it’s a massive effect.”
Whitakers makes 10 million pieces of chocolate a week in a factory on the much-expanded site of the original bakery where the business began.
Automated production lines snake through the site moulding, cutting, cooling, coating and wrapping a relentless procession of fondants, cremes, crisps and pure chocolate products for customers, including own-brand retail, supermarkets, and the catering trade.
Steepest inflation in the business
All of them have faced price increases as Whitakers has grappled with some of the steepest inflation in the food business.
Cocoa prices have soared in the last two years, largely because of a succession of poor cocoa harvests in West Africa, where Ghana and the Ivory Coast produce around two-thirds of global supply.
A combination of drought and crop disease cut global output by around 14% last year, pushing consumer prices in the other direction, with chocolate inflation passing 17% in the UK in October.
Skimpflation and shrinkflation
Some major brands have responded by cutting the chocolate content of products – “skimpflation” – or charging more for less – “shrinkflation”.
Household-name brands including Penguin and Club have cut the cocoa and milk solid content so far they can no longer be classified as chocolate, and are marketed instead as “chocolate-flavour”.
Whitakers have stuck to their recipes and product sizes, choosing to pass price increases on to customers while adapting products to the new market conditions.
“Not only are major brands putting up prices over 20%, sometimes 40%, they’ve also reduced the size of their pieces and sometimes the ingredients,” says William Whitaker.
“We haven’t done any of that. We knew that long-term, the market will fall again, and that happier days will return.
“We’ve introduced new products where we’ve used chocolate as a coating rather than a solid chocolate because the centre, which is sugar-based, is cheaper than the chocolate.
“We’ve got a big product range of fondant creams, and others like gingers and Brazil nuts, where we’re using that chocolate as a coating.”
The costs are adding up
A deluge of price rises
Brazil nuts have enjoyed their own spike in price, more than doubling to £15,000 a tonne at one stage.
On top of commodity prices determined by markets beyond their control, Whitakers face the same inflationary pressures as other UK businesses.
“We’ve had the minimum wage increasing every year, we had the national insurance rise last year, and sort of hidden a little bit in this budget is a business rate increase.
“This is a small business, we turn over £12m, but our rates will go up nearly £100,000 next year before any other costs.
“If you add up all the cocoa and all the other cost increases in 2024 and 2025, it’s nearly £3m of cost increases we’ve had to bear. Some of that is returning to a little normality. It does test the relevance of what you do.”
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