LETTER | Cancer management is a continuous public health challenge in Malaysia.
| I refer to the recent cabinet decision to turn down the request to harmonise general practitioner fees and the price control mechanism drugs.
Optimum cancer health services can only be delivered via good policies and governance, integrated infrastructure and systems for awareness, prevention and early detection besides efficient and timely diagnoses, treatment and supportive care. Sadly, the need for a better understanding of the involvement of primary care physicians or GPs in cancer care is lacking. The GPs’ tasks within the broad cancer care spectrum may range from prevention, cancer screening and diagnosis, treatment of side-effects during definitive cancer therapy, shared follow-up and survivorship care, to bereavement and end-of-life care. This is the work of a professional the value of which should not be overlooked.
In established cancer diagnoses, tertiary prevention focuses on reducing the impact of the disease with rehabilitation and improvement of patients’ quality of life. The general practitioner plays a huge role in implementing secondary prevention and they can be instrumental in the initial decision-making by the patient to go on the clinical pathway rather than the unproven treatment pathway.
Mobilising appropriate resources in order to reduce the physical, social and psychological impacts of cancer on individual patients cannot be carried out with community pharmacists or be entrusted only to healthcare professionals within public health facilities.
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