Advanced Lung Cancer Survival in Times of Economic Hardship: A Greek Paradigm

Abstract

Objective: Greece has been affected more than any other European country from the financial crisis that began in 2010. Just 20 months after Greece exited an eight-year long aid program, forecasts of a new recession within 2020 due to COVID-19 pandemic make concerns regarding the compromise of health care quality within the new crisis relevant once again. In this study we sought to evaluate clinical outcomes in patients with advanced lung cancer in the pre-crisis and crisis era in a dedicated oncology centre in Greece. Methods: A retrospective analysis of 522 consecutive medical records of lung cancer patients admitted in a Greek dedicated cancer hospital between the years 2008-2013 was performed. Progression Free Survival (PFS) and Overall Survival (OS) were calculated for advanced lung cancer compared over two consecutive time periods using 2010 as a cutoff point.Result: 71 and 78 patients comprised the study sample for the two periods. PFS and OS were similar over the two periods (7.73 [6.42-9.04] vs. 6.03 [5.02-7.04] and 13.70 [9.61-17.79] vs. 11.08 [7.74-15.92] months, respectively). Higher Performance Status (PS) was associated with worse survival measures over both periods, while no statistical significance was reached for OS in the latter period. Dissimilarities in PFS were observed between beneficiaries of different insurance trusts. Conclusion: Clinical outcomes for advanced lung cancer have not changed as a result of the financial crisis in our institution. The insurance provider seems to affect health outcomes. This old paradigm could serve as new guidance in the forthcoming recession due to COVID-19 pandemic.

The Impact of COVID-19 on Cancer Care in the Post Pandemic World: Five Major Lessons Learnt from Challenges and Countermeasures of Major Asian Cancer Centres

“…Workload was affected and reduced partly because of intentional rescheduling of patients but also partly due to fear of patients in seeking treatment for fear of being infected, especially since patients with cancer could be at an elevated risk of COVID-19 severe infection and mortality (Shankar et al, 2020). On the other hand, several institutions highlighted the additional need to allocate staff in COVID-19 specific wards, which disturbed the human resource management observed in European Union (van de Haar et al, 2020), United States of America (Lou et al, 2020), United Kingdom (Greenwood and Swanton, 2021), Saudi Arabia (Alessy et al, 2020), United Arab Emirates (Al-Shamsi et al, 2020), Greek (Miltiadou et al, 2020), India (Kumar et al, 2020), and Morocco (Bouanani et al, 2020) . Whether this will result in an increase in late stage diagnoses remains to be confirmed with time.…”

Review on the Oncology Practice in the Midst of COVID-19 Crisis: The Challenges and Solutions

“…One of these issues is the negative impacts of the viral pandemic on the common oncology practice, which has prompted the community oncologists to search for approaches to maintain their practices while improving the quality of care for patients (Kumar et al, 2020;Poonia et al, 2020;Yadav et al, 2020b). In this regard, experts from all over the world have presented international and national guidelines to cope with the crisis and to provide adjusted care (Ameri et al, 2020a;Ameri et al, 2020b;Dabkara et al, 2020;Miltiadou et al, 2020;Mousavi et al, 2020;Prajoko and…”