Recently, an article was published on Greater Kashmir on 2 October 2024 titled ‘Establishing oncology services in all the new government medical colleges of J&K’ by Doctor Mir Husain, a medical oncologist, in which he appealed for expanding cancer care mechanisms all across Kashmir. Highlighting the increasing number of lethal diseases and the gravity of them with statistics and calculations, he suggested that the OPDS and their associates be impartially functional in providing services to the patients. The picture of the life-eating disease and the scarcity of the doctors in the remotest areas is depressing and points to the need to do something about it.
I would like to add my two cents, other than what the doctor has already pointed out. First and foremost, the facility of ‘Daycare Ward’ needs to be put in place across all the hospitals in the region. The ward takes care of the already diagnosed patients, giving them medicinal doses and nursing them. Tens and hundreds of patients flock the ward at SKIMS on a regular basis, ending up in long, troubling queues from the start to the end. Beyond, it’s useless for patients to have them bear the brunt of crossing the less charted mountainous roads to reach the SKIMS for a doze that can be so easily given at a sub-district hospital under the care of a nurse and doctor, if need be. Telephone exchange could have been one of the best options between a medical oncologist and the nurse at the ward to check up on the patient’s progress while dozing.
It would be prudent to think that the most critical patients are treated by senior doctors at SKIMS, and the less critical be looked into at the most regional centre of it. If full-fledged cancer care across Kashmir is supposed to take time, then as of now every hospital should have at least one qualified oncologist to see the varying dimensions of the disease and treat it, and maintain connection with the senior ones already at SKIMS, if need arises.
Not only will we have diversified cancer care this way, but also save the patients the nagging trouble of thinking, ‘Why SKIMS—It must be something deadly—expensive—distressing—and depressing.’ We treat eyes, legs, liver, and kidneys; why not go all out for cancer care? Avoidable things that the authorities didn’t bother to care about.
PS: We need to bring about change at both collective and individual levels. Leave out individuals for a second; don’t we have a responsibility to address the interests of the far-off regions in want of cancer care at regional levels?