José Luis Passos Coelho, medical oncologist, and director of the Oncology Center at Hospital da Luz Lisboa was one of SIC's special guests to talk about cancer on World Cancer Day. The specialist was live for about an hour on SIC Notícias, talking about the national reality in this area, in particular the effects of the pandemic on the delay in diagnoses and treatments of this pathology. Emphasizing that this was a situation seen all over the world, he explained that health services had to 'reinvent themselves so as not to fail to respond to their patients undergoing treatment'. And he gave the example of Hospital da Luz Lisboa, which transferred the entire oncology service to Hospital da Luz Oeiras, thus guaranteeing exclusive access and space, so that patients could maintain their consultations, exams, and treatments in 'total safety', and without the need to contact other people and other patients, more exposed to the virus' that causes Covid-19. He also said that 'in our hospitals’, oncological surgeries with short intervention windows, that is, those that could not be postponed, were always carried out, ensuring that patients did not fail to be treated at the right time. The Hospital da Luz specialist said, on the other hand, and in line with what many others also said throughout the day of the SIC broadcast dedicated to cancer, that it is still difficult to accurately predict the costs of delay in cancer diagnoses – 'because hospitals were ordered to close for everything that wasn't Covid-19 and because people themselves were afraid to go to health services'. But he confirmed that, daily, health professionals in this area are faced with many cases of patients who arrive late at diagnosis, with complaints from several months ago, and that all this worsens their prognosis for intervention and treatment. Oncological disease is the second most frequent cause of death in Portugal. The Portuguese League Against Cancer estimates that, last year, around 30,100 people died, a number that everyone predicts will tend to grow in the coming years, given the delays in diagnosis and treatment caused by the pandemic.
