BRISTOL A growing number of women are waiting too long for breast cancer diagnoses because of a Government target, doctors say.
The Department of Health introduced a “two-week wait rule” in 1999 for urgent cases of suspected breast cancer, but doctors from the Frenchay Breast Care Centre in Bristol say that this has meant that nonurgent cases — the group from which a third of cancers are ultimately diagnosed — are kept waiting.
A study of 24,999 referrals to the Bristol clinic from 1999 to 2205 found that while the number of patients referred under the two-week rule increased, the percentage diagnosed with cancer fell from 12.8 per cent to 7.7 per cent. The number of routine referrals fell, but the percentage of cancer cases in that group more than doubled to 5.3 per cent in 2005.