10-year national plan to tackle cancer features increased use of AI

  • 4 February 2022
10-year national plan to tackle cancer features increased use of AI

The UK government has unveiled a 10-year national plan to tackle cancer which includes an increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

In a speech later today, health secretary, Sajid Javid will be setting out his plans on how to make England a world-leader in cancer care.

According to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), a key element of the decade-long plan will be building on the latest scientific advances and partnering with the “country’s technology pioneers”.

“Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, for example, have the potential to help the health service radically improve its assessment of cancer risk,” a release by DHSC states.

In his speech, Javid is expected to “declare a national war on cancer”.

“This Plan will show how we are learning the lessons from the pandemic, and apply them to improving cancer services over the next decade,” he is expected to add.

“It will take a far-reaching look at how we want cancer care to be in 2032 – ten years from now. Looking at all stages, from prevention, to diagnosis, to treatment and vaccines.

“We want to hear views from far and wide to help us shape this work. Please join us in this effort, so fewer people face the heartache of losing a loved one to this wretched disease.”

The renewed focus on the use of innovation in cancer treated has been welcomed by the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) but they have raised concerns about out-of-date systems.

Dr. Jeanette Dickson, president of the RCR, said: “. Cancer is devastating too many lives and the backlog needs to be tackled. Diagnostic scanning is crucial to winning the war on cancer, but there’s no quick fix.

“We have a shortfall of nearly 2000 consultant radiologists, the doctors who interpret complex scans, and we need a long term plan to solve this; equally, too many scanning machines are out of date, making them slower, less accurate, and disconnected from IT systems.

“IT is a huge problem in the NHS already – systems don’t talk to each other and even logging on can take a doctor valuable time.”

These comments from the RCR follows the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) writing to the government in July 2021 calling for it to prioritise digital reporting capabilities across imaging in the NHS.

A report found that patients were being failed by recurrent issues with the way X-rays and scans are reported on and followed up.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Sign up

Related News

AI tool to help detect lung cancer deployed in Greater Manchester

AI tool to help detect lung cancer deployed in Greater Manchester

AI that helps detect diseases such as lung cancer quicker is being rolled out at seven trusts within the Greater Manchester Imaging Network.
Ambient voice technology to draft patient letters piloted for NHS use

Ambient voice technology to draft patient letters piloted for NHS use

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children is leading a pan-London, 5,000 patient assessment of the use of ambient voice technology.
AI software improves odds of good maternity care by 69%, say researchers

AI software improves odds of good maternity care by 69%, say researchers

Women are more likely to receive good care during pregnancy when AI and other clinical software tools are used, researchers have found.

3 Comments

  • Another PR stunt.
    The National Cancer Strategy was only initiated in 2019 and never really got off the ground due to the pandemic and the impact of “austerity” whic has meant that cancer RTT targets which were met in 2010 haven’t been met for several years now. There is little new in this announcement, which wasn’t in the 2019 plan.
    We don’t need a war on anything, we need sustained investment in NHS services combined with a long term workforce development plan to ensure the NHS has enough of the right staff at the right time over the coming decades. Don’t take my word for this, all the leading health charities are campaigning for this supported by, of all people, Jeremy Hunt.

  • A “national war on cancer” is more of the deceptions of the leading liars-in-power whom most people endlessly keep trusting, voting for, obeying, and worshiping.

    The official mainstream “war on cancer” has been an unofficial “war” on the unsuspecting public: to keep them misinformed and misguided about the real truth of this “war.” The “moonshot” program is an extension or reincarnation of the enduring deep racket.

    The orthodox cancer establishment has been saying a cure for cancer “is just around the corner” and “we’re winning the war on cancer” for decades. It’s all hype and lies (read Dr. Guy Faguet’s ‘War on cancer,” Dr. Sam Epstein’s work, or Clifton Leaf’s book, or Dr. Siefried’s work on this bogus ‘war’, etc). The criminal medical establishment deliberate and falsely self-servingly claims and distorts a ‘win’ in the bogus ‘war on cancer’ when the only notably win is a reduction in lung cancer due to a huge reduction in smoking, which has nothing to do with their cancer treatments. Lying is their mode of operation.

    Since the war on cancer began orthodox medicine hasn’t progressed in their basic highly profitable therapies: it still uses primarily and almost exclusively highly toxic, deadly things like radiation, chemo, surgery, and drugs that have killed millions of people instead of the disease.

    As long as the official “war on cancer” is a HUGE BUSINESS based on expensive TREATMENTS (INTERVENTIONS) of a disease instead of its PREVENTION, logically, they will never find a cure for cancer. The moonshot-war on cancer inventions, too, includes industry-profitable gene therapies of cancer treatment that are right in line with the erroneous working model of mechanistic reductionism of allopathic medicine.

    The lucrative game of the medical business is to endlessly “look for” a cure but not “find” a cure. Practically all resources in the phony ‘war on cancer’ are poured into TREATMENT of cancer but almost none in the PREVENTION of the disease. It’s proof positive that big money and a total lack of ethics rule the official medical establishment.

    It’s just like with any bogus official “war” (‘war on drugs’, ‘war on terrorism’, etc) — it’s not about winning these wars but to primarily prolong them because behind any of these fraudulent “war” rackets of the criminal establishment is a Big Business, such as the massive cancer industry. The very profitable TREATMENT focus of conventional medicine, instead of a PREVENTION focus which these official medical quacks (or rather crooks) can hardly make any money off, is a major reason why today 1 of 2 men and 1 in 3 women can expect a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes yet that rate was multiple times lower 5 decades ago when the phony ‘war on cancer’ began (1 in about 16). And 5 decades ago when this bogus war began cancer was the second leading cause of death and 50 years later it is STILL the second leading cause of death in the country this “war” was declared in. These facts alone prove we are NOT winning the war on cancer.

    At the same time, this same orthodox cancer cartel has been suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches. You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia’s lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.

    If the public were to scrutinize what the medical industry and its government pawns are telling them about the ‘war on cancer’ instead of blindly believing what they’re saying, they’d find that the cancer industry and the cancer charities have been dismissing, ignoring, and obfuscating the true causes of cancer while mostly putting the blame for cancer on the individual, denying or dismissing the serious harms from orthodox cancer treatments and chemical toxicants, and resorting to deceptive cancer statistics to “educate” (think: mislead) the public that their way of treatment is actually successful (read this well referenced scholarly article’s afterword on the war on cancer: do a search engine query for “A Mammogram Letter The British Medical Journal Censored” by Rolf Hefti, a published author of the Orthomolecular Medicine News organization, and scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent ‘war on cancer’).

    What the medical establishment “informs” the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.

    Does anyone really think it’s a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the ‘war on cancer’ a fraud? If you look closer you’ll come to the same conclusion. But…politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large. Or people’s own denial or indifference of the real truth.

  • The WAR on TERROR, THE WAR ON DRUGS , THE WAR ON OBESITY .
    SABRE RATTLING WORDS THAT THOUGHOUT MY LIFE HAVE CAUSED REAL WARS REAL SUFFERING REAL PAIN.These so called WARS , NEVER SORTED IMPROVED OR STOPPED ANYTHING INSTEAD CREATED WEALTH FOR THE RICH AND MISERY FOR THE PEOPLE. YOUR WAR ON CANCER IS A JOKE. RELEASE THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE AND TREATMENT FOR HUMANITY THAT YOU HAVE HIDDEN SINCE 1939 CANCER ACT.
    NO WAR ON CANCER INSTEAD RELEASE THE TRUTH
    WE SEE YOU SAVID JAVID.

Comments are closed.