Abstract
Urinary bladder carcinoma is the most frequently occurring cancer of the urinary tract. Like any other types of cancer the diagnosis, treatment and overall management of urinary bladder cancer is not only expensive but also time consuming. During all these procedures, patients face several barriers while accessing care. The physicians and healthcare administrative or policy makers have the opportunity to closely observe patients' situation or their view towards existing policy and support system. Objective of this study is to explore professionals' perspective on access to care for patients with urinary bladder carcinoma in Scotland in order to identify recent progresses and difficulties faced by patients at different stages of management of the disease. Semi structured interview approach was chosen for its suitability for exploring attitudes, values, beliefs and motives. A total of twelve participants were interviewed. All the twelve participants were chosen through purposive sampling. A phenomenological approach was used to explore perspectives of these twelve professionals having experience of treating patients with urinary bladder carcinoma. All the participants despite of the differences in their views have identified backlog and/or long standing waiting list, lack of patient centered care and shortage of infrastructure, as major barriers in access to care for urinary bladder carcinoma patients. The major gaps identified were inefficiencies of the system and lack of focus on bladder cancer. According to the participants' financial deficiency, systemic complication, age group and socio-economic status of patients are the biggest challenges to overcome these barriers. Professionals gave their opinion for increasing the capacity of the service by establishing bladder cancer care centers and also employing skilled workforce in accordance to the patient number in these centers.
Highlights
Worldwide each year an estimated 382,660 new cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed
To maintain anonymity the participants were assigned with two identification letters for each: specialist physicians / consultants of urinary bladder carcinoma were denoted ‘CU’; registrar in urology was denoted 'RU'; specialist nurses were denoted ‘SN’; GPs were denoted ‘GP’ and the healthcare administrator was denoted ‘HA’
As found in the literature review long standing waiting list [79] still seems to be the major obstacle for the patients with urinary bladder carcinoma seeking for accessing to care
Summary
Worldwide each year an estimated 382,660 new cases of bladder cancer are diagnosed. In terms of most frequently occurring cancers urinary bladder carcinoma is at number six. It is the most frequently occurring cancer of urinary tract accounting for 1 in every 30 cancer in the United Kingdom [1]. In Scotland urinary bladder carcinoma is the fifth most common cause of cancer in men and fifteenth most common among women. In the year 2010 in Scotland the number of new case diagnosed with urinary bladder cancer was 778 (male 542, female 236) and number of deaths recorded in 2011 were 472 (male 294, female 178). In Scotland between the year 2003 to 2007, 55.1% of the male patients and 37.7%
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