Availability of treatments on the NHS
The availability of certain treatments on the NHS (or lack thereof) has been receiving a lot of attention following the recent case of five-year-old cancer patient Ashya King.
The availability of certain treatments on the NHS (or lack thereof) has been receiving a lot of attention following the recent case of five-year-old cancer patient Ashya King whose parents removed him from Southampton General Hospital in order to seek a type of treatment for their son which is generally not offered in the UK. Parents Brett and Naghemeh King removed Ashya from hospital and took him to Spain, sparking a controversial international police hunt and resulting in their arrest under a European Arrest Warrant, with their son being made a ward of court at the request of Portsmouth City Council. The high court in London subsequently lifted all legal controls over the child, the CPS dropped charges and freed the parents and the family was reunited in Prague, where the parents hope a Czech hospital will be able to use proton beam therapy to treat Ashya.
What is proton beam therapy?
Proton beam therapy is essentially a form of radiotherapy which is more targeted towards killing cancerous cells and causes less damage to surrounding tissue compared to conventional radiotherapy. This means that it can potentially be a safer form of treatment when dealing with certain types of cancer, causing fewer side effects. It’s used most often to treat brain tumours in young children whose brains are still developing. However, as it’s a relatively new type of treatment, its effectiveness in treating cancer is still open to question and it’s normally reserved for very rare types of cancer.
So does the NHS not offer proton beam therapy?
The NHS currently only has a low energy proton machine used specifically to treat some eye cancers; it’s not powerful enough to treat most brain tumours (as in the case of Ashya). Although the NHS is building two proton beam centres which are expected to open in 2018, this means that proton beam therapy is generally not available in the UK. However, the NHS sends patients abroad for proton beam therapy if their doctors decide it is sufficiently suitable, and over 400 patients have been sent abroad in this manner since 2008, with the costs of treatment being funded by the NHS. Patients who still want to undergo proton beam therapy, despite not being deemed ideally suited by their care team, are left with either having to argue their case, possibly with the help of medical negligence solicitors, or going abroad and paying for treatment themselves. Although going abroad may have it’s setbacks as the cases of surgical error claims have been on the rise as medical tourism has also been on the rise so it really is about weighing up all the options as much as possible.
