With the growing burden of cancer and financial pressures on our health care systems, there is an urgent need to improve the efficiency in cancer care. Improving efficiency is not a question of linear cost-cutting – but of finding ways to allocate resources more efficiently to achieve better outcomes for patients. This will require tough decisions, and thinking in terms of long-term investments rather than short-term policy fixes.
All.Can Canada
In April 2018, Save Your Skin Foundation (SYSF), a national patient-led not-for-profit group dedicated to leading the fight against non-melanoma skin cancers, melanoma and ocular melanoma, was established as All.Can Canada’s Secretariat to lead the initiative in Canada. SYSF convened a Working Group to discuss how to bring All.Can into the Canadian healthcare space. The Working Group has completed a year one discovery phase, to gather and collate information from various sources and from perspectives of all healthcare stakeholders, with the goal of identifying inefficiencies and waste in cancer care across Canada.
On November 14, 2019 an inaugural multi-stakeholder meeting will be held in Toronto to build consensus on priorities, to develop strategies, and to create a multi-year work plan to tackle inefficiencies in cancer care as discovered in the patient-reported findings detailed in the report ‘Patient Insights on Canadian Cancer Care – All.Can Canada Patient Survey Report.’ The All.Can Canada Steering Committee will be assembled with representation from all stakeholder groups to support, guide and oversee the progress of this multi-year project. For more information please contact all.can@saveyourskin.ca.
All.Can Canada Activities & Milestones
- Development and implementation of pre-meeting surveys to evaluate the perspectives of stakeholders – including patients, patient group representatives, health care professionals, pharmaceutical industry representatives, policy makers and health technology assessment groups – on the greatest areas of waste and inefficiency in cancer care in Canada.
- Establishment of an evidence base of patient insights gained from people’s personal experience, to identify opportunities to reallocate resources to improve patient health outcomes and value of care.
- External advisory meeting with senior health policy experts from across Canada to discuss issues related to access to innovative therapies and the prioritisation of cancer funding within the health system.
