BY BRIGITTE PETERSEN
A new Lung Diagnostic Assessment Program (DAP) introduced by Regional Cancer Care Northwest aims to cut wait times by more than half for lung cancer test results.
Sam McKnight, manager of Diagnostic Assessment Programs and Diagnostic Imaging at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre (TBRHSC), said the new program will help ensure that “patients are on the right pathway at the earliest opportunity.” Main benefits of the program include reduced wait times for patients and lower hospital admissions.
Before the new strategy was implemented, the average patient would wait about 18 weeks for diagnosis. The current target for diagnosis is six to seven weeks.
“The whole mandate of the DAP is to get people diagnosed in a timely manner,” said McKnight. “We know we are going to be improving the patient experience.”
The new program follows on the success of the Colorectal DAP, which has been in place for one year at TBRHSC and has reduced wait times for colonoscopies by about four weeks.
The wait time between finding an abnormality or symptom to the time of diagnosis can be stressful, and the new DAP process helps ease anxiety while providing patients and families with support during the diagnostic phase, according to McKnight.
Streamline
Lung cancer can be difficult to screen, which often leads to a late diagnosis. McKnight said the new DAP program will help streamline the process for patients.
“There’s no universally accepted screening tool for lung cancer,” she said. “That makes it really complicated for it to be diagnosed.”
The new program is part of a Cancer Care Ontario initiative to improve access to services for patients living throughout the province. The program also strives to improve connections between services from diagnosis to treatment.
Regional Cancer Care Northwest assembled an inter-disciplinary team of health-care professionals in January 2010 who met regularly to work on the Lung DAP project. The team mapped out the patient process and looked at how to improve times for diagnosis. When determining typical timelines for patients with a suspicion of lung cancer be ingreferred to Thunder Bay’s only thoracic surgeon, Dr. Kenneth Gehman, the team found that the best case was about 42 days, while the worst was 206 days from the time of referral to the time of diagnosis. The team looked at ways to improve those timelines and speed up the testing process.
McKnight said the current target to get an appointment to see Dr. Gehman is 14 days.
Family members of patients had input into the development of the DAP program.
Regional Cancer Care Northwest began implementing the program last November and officially announced the project in March.
Patients going through the DAP process fill out a patient questionnaire to determine if they should be referred to a social worker, a dietitian, or another health care professional.
“We’re hoping to identify issues earlier, and get patients the help that they need,” said McKnight.
McKnight said a web-based portal called an Electronic Pathway Solution is also being launched at the end of June to allow patients and physicians to access medical information along the diagnostic journey.
“Physicians will be able to see their patients’ test results,” explained McKnight. “Patients will be able to see that their test results are available, but they won’t be able to see the actual results.”
Lung cancer in Ontario
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer death in Ontario. An estimated 6,700 people - 3,700 men and 3,000 women - died of lung cancer in 2010. The second leading cause of cancer death in Ontario is colorectal cancer. An estimated 3,400 people died of colorectal cancer in 2010 across Ontario.
Smoking tobacco is the main cause of lung cancer. People who live or work with people who smoke are also at increased risk because they are exposed to second hand smoke. Other factors that increase the risk of lung cancer include exposure to asbestos and other substances, such asarsenic or drinking water that contains high levels of arsenic, chromium and nickel, exposure to radon gas, a family history of lung cancer, and air pollution. Some people develop lung cancer without any of these risk factors.
Brigitte Petersen is a freelance writerbased in Thunder Bay.
www.cancercare.on.ca
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