At the Workshop on Multimodal Cancer Treatment and Hospital Management in the Digital Age - ASCO 2024 Update on October 31, Prof. Dr. Le Van Quang - Director of K Hospital - shared: Cancer is becoming a major burden in countries around the world, especially in poor and developing countries. Cancer prevention is still a major challenge for medicine in the world, not only requiring modern and updated knowledge and techniques from doctors, but also requiring efforts from the patients themselves, their families, and active support from society and the community.
Deputy Minister of Health Tran Van Thuan said that the cost of cancer treatment is also a major economic burden for the whole society. The expenditure on cancer drugs in 2023 is 7,521 billion VND, ranking first in the total drug payment from the Health Insurance Fund.
From the patient’s perspective, the burden of paying out of pocket for cancer treatment is enormous. According to hospital statistics, the average cost of treatment for a cancer patient is over 176 million VND/year, of which the patient must pay up to 70%.
"Faced with these challenges, we need to have appropriate health policies so that the health system has enough capacity and resources to effectively and sustainably respond to cancer prevention," said Deputy Minister Tran Van Thuan.
Professor Le Van Quang added that cancer is a special disease, difficult to treat and has a very high recurrence rate. After more than 30 years, cancer treatment in our country has been improved. Vietnam is approaching other countries in the world in terms of medicine and cancer treatment techniques. Patients are personalized for each person, helping to improve treatment.
Multimodality treatment is the combination of many methods to improve the effectiveness of cancer control. The 3 classic treatment methods (surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy) are increasingly showing their indispensable importance in cancer treatment.
The Deputy Minister of Health said that it is necessary to further promote the work of educating people about cancer prevention and early cancer screening. Cancer can be cured if detected early.
Second, continue to promote propaganda to call on people to continue to proactively and actively participate in health insurance to move towards universal health insurance because this is a lifesaver for people if they are unfortunate enough to get sick, especially cancer.
Third, it is necessary to strengthen the implementation of training and technology transfer in service packages as well as continue to maintain and support transferred techniques to avoid widespread training.
