Researchers analyzed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer living in England.
The COVID-19 pandemic significantly affected the outcomes and health care access for individuals with pancreatic cancer living in England from January 2015 through March 2023, according to a study published in eLife Sciences.1 The authors said the findings suggest that if a similar public health crisis were to arise in the future, health care services should focus on the unmet needs of patients with cancer.
“During the pandemic, the resources, and the attention in health care systems globally, shifted towards preventing and managing COVID-19. Access to the non-COVID-19-related health care changed, waiting times increased, and cancer pathways including treatment standards were adapted,” the authors wrote. “In addition, patients’ health care-seeking behavior changed as people adopted social distancing and shielding to protect themselves and health care systems from unprecedented pressures of the pandemic.”
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When the COVID-19 pandemic reached global levels, it became a public health event that no one living at the time had ever experienced. Forced to stay inside and limit physical interactions across hundreds of industries, the population’s focus became stopping the virus and staying protected against it. In turn, other health care services—like oncologic care—did not receive as much assistance and was deprioritized because of the pandemic.
According to National Institutes of Health data, one of the most common reasons for decreased health care access during the pandemic was the fact that the health care workforce collectively shifted its focus to COVID-19 care. However, there were other external pressures stemming from the pandemic that more significantly impacted the health care workforce itself, not just its focus.
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“The most common reasons mentioned for critical gaps or reducing services during COVID-19 were shifting of health care workers to support COVID-19 services, cancellations of planned treatments, decrease in public transport, loss of income to pay for services and limit utilization, and high rates of morbidity and mortality among health care workers, were another reason leading to staff shortages,” wrote authors of a study published in the Ethiopian Journal of Health Science.2
Researchers from the eLife Sciences study wanted to address the impact of staffing shortages and shifts in health system focuses on non-COVID-19 complications. For the purposes of this study, set in England, they chose to focus on patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer between January 1, 2015, and March 31, 2023.1
Regarding the study population, researchers included a total of 26,840 participants (mean age, 72; 52% men) with pancreatic cancer. Throughout the study period, there was an average of 267 pancreatic cancer diagnoses each month. A total of 10,785 (40%) participants also received a diabetes diagnosis sometime in their lives.
As the researchers predicted, they found no significant impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on pancreatic cancer or diabetes diagnoses. However, while the onset of the pandemic did not significantly impact diabetes or pancreatic cancer rates, it indeed impacted medical services to a significantly greater extent, especially those focusing on pancreatic cancer care.
“We found that many of the pancreatic cancer-related services were disrupted across the pathway of care. This is in line with previous reports about health care being negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic,” continued the authors.1 “Healthcare assessments, such as BMI, HbA1c, and liver function, were delivered to fewer people than would be expected if the pandemic had not occurred. This could impair not only the early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, but also diagnosis of other diseases such as diabetes.”
In 2015, 70% of patients contacted their primary health care provider (PHCP) before their diagnosis and 80% contacted their PHCP after diagnosis. Over time and as the pandemic continued, those rates jumped to 90% in 2022, showing that PHCPs had to address greater needs for their patient populations due to the pandemic.
Researchers identified no significant effects directly stemming from the COVID-19 virus on patients with pancreatic cancer. However, the policies and procedures that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant and unprecedented impact on the lives of patients living with pancreatic cancer and beyond. While further research is being conducted regarding population impacts of the pandemic, researchers suggest health systems use the pandemic as a lesson for how to approach health care access going forward.
“Positive lessons could be learnt from the resilient health care services which continued to deliver health care undisrupted, or those initially affected, where active measures to recover the capacity and volume of care were implemented quickly and safely. On the other hand, the reductions in health care experienced by people with non-COVID-19 illnesses such as pancreatic cancer, bolster the argument that efforts should focus on addressing the unmet needs of people with cancer,” concluded the authors.1
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