Cancer campaigner hails justice at last (From Oxford Mail)

Cancer campaigner hails justice at last

7:00pm Friday 30th July 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

‘OUR action in taking cancer patients from Oxfordshire to demonstrate in London on August 27, 2008, hit the headlines and was the catalyst which opened up the whole scandal of cancer patients being denied drugs.

I am just so fortunate to be living in west Oxfordshire, where our MP, David Cameron, has given us his support on several occasions in our fight for justice and, of course, as our Prime Minister, he has now delivered on his promise of the cancer drugs fund a full six months earlier than expected.

This will give many cancer patients the chance of extra time with their families.

Our group identified a surplus of funding in the NHS and wrote to Mr Cameron and the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, to see if any of that surplus could be used.

Nobody knows yet if £200m will be enough and we hope that amount will not be cut in the Government’s spending review, that takes place in the autumn.

We will keep the pressure on to try to ensure that the funding that has been agreed will not be cut in any way.

The devil is in the detail and hopefully we will soon know more about how the fund will operate, but Mr Cameron has given cancer sufferers hope.

When you are told you have cancer, what makes it worse is to know there is a drug that can help and it is available in other countries but you are not allowed to have it.

Mr Cameron has restored hope to thousands of patients with rare cancers, who had been left by the wayside by the previous government.

On a personal front, over the past three years since my diagnosis, it has been a constant battle against bureaucracy, which is something no cancer patient should have to deal with.

It has been a struggle at times to find the strength to go on with all this campaigning, but I am pleased with the outcome. I feel that I have at last achieved something positive in my life and hopefully will now be able to give more time to my wife and family, whose love and support has been invaluable to me over the past few years.

I only hope that the NHS surplus I identified will not all be used in redundancy money, when “underspends” have been carried forward for four years, while patients have been denied drugs.

I cannot thank the team at the Oxford Mail enough, for they have supported us from the very beginning by covering the inequality kidney cancer patients had suffered here due to the harsh policy of NHS Oxfordshire, before we persuaded Nice to do a U-turn on Sutent (Sunitinib) – still the only drug Nice has recommended for us.

My fellow campaigners, Rose Woodward and Julia Black, have given so much of their time to help patients in their struggle for cancer drugs from primary care trusts around the country, with a good deal of success.’