Mike Kinnaird, Content Producer at Cancer Can Do One Podcast, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I was looking at where £3.3 billion goes in the UK National Cancer Plan announced last week.
- £2.3bn for scanners and diagnostic equipment.
- £604m for digital pathology systems.
- £96m for automated lab processing.
- £70m for new radiotherapy machines.
Adult psychological support after cancer treatment? £0.
The plan points out just how really important that support is in the individual cancer follow-up, which so many have pressed for. So please tell me I missed it or didn’t ‘get it.’ Please tell me there is commited funding after all. Because all I could see was…no cash at all, just acknowledgement – which is important, but…
Now, this got me thinking…
We fund what we can photograph. You can take a picture of a new £5 million scanner. You can stand in front of it at the ribbon-cutting. You can point to it and say ‘we did this.’
You can’t take a picture of a person feeling safe again after cancer. You can’t photograph the moment someone stops checking their body for lumps every morning. Would you really want to photograph panic even if you could?
You can’t ribbon-cut ‘this person sleeps through the night now.’
We fund the visible. We underfund the invisible. Or so it seems. Equipment over time. Things and ‘stuff’ over people. Because things prove you did something. We can see it. It works on social media so it’s got reach.
Now, you may say this is just Mike being cynical and likely ungrateful that such significant funding has been pledged at all. I understand that. It’s just that the spreadsheet rarely has a column headed ‘Emotions’. And you can’t put that in an annual report. Where else are we doing this? Is this the story in your country? Tell me. What’s the picture where you are? What else are we funding because it’s visible rather than because it works?”
Olubukola Ayodele, Co-convenor at London Global Cancer Week, shared Mike Kinnaird’s post, adding:
“This is so spot on Mike Kinnaird. It’s sad that the focus are on shiny things. All these diagnostics are not going to run themselves. There’s no dedicated funding to address workforce shortages across all oncology services. There’s no funding to address social determinants of health. It would be interesting to see how this all plays out in the coming months.
Like I said in my post ‘Cancer plans do not deliver care. People Do.‘”
More posts featuring Mike Kinnaird.