He Jie, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the National Cancer Center, responded to the issue of hyper-indications for oncology treatment at a press conference of the National Health and Wellness Commission on April 27, 2021. The National Cancer Center was established as early as 2013 under the direct leadership of the National Health Commission as the National Center for Oncology Quality Control, which has been extremely active in promoting quality control of single disease types of oncology as well as standardized diagnostic and therapeutic behaviors of various cancers,mainly accomplishing the work of strengthening the systematic management, enhancing professionalism, and promoting the homogenization of diagnostic and therapeutic treatments.
I. Strengthening system management
From the country's 28 provinces, the three-tier quality control system has been formed from the national to the provincial and then to the prefecture-level cities to further implement a series of policies for quality control.
Secondly, to improve the professional level
The National Cancer Quality Control Center has set up expert committees for quality control of single diseases, for example, the expert committee for quality control of breast cancer, and the expert committee for quality control of diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. As we all know, radiation therapy is a more complicated treatment means, and there are also quality control expert committees for radiation therapy. All of these regulate medical practices professionally and provide training and guidance to various medical institutions with the aim of further strengthening standardization.
Third, to promote the homogenization of diagnosis and treatment
It is in the single disease quality control of such a disease, breast cancer, for example, first selected more than 200 medical institutions as a pilot, these institutions from the guideline to the diagnosis and treatment process to carry out a rigorous standardization of the requirements, including lung, colorectal and liver cancers are very quickly to the country to implement, so that different medical institutions can meet the quality control requirements. In this way, different medical institutions can achieve homogenization, and through the development of single disease quality control, quality can be controlled, quality can be assessed, quality can be improved, and at the same time, it should be effective.
Through this work, the state further standardized the behavior of malignant tumor diagnosis and treatment, and continuously improved the quality of medical care, hoping to further improve the survival rate and quality of life of malignant tumor patients.
On the issue of medication for over-indication of tumor treatment ?
At the conference, Hejie said that the individual differences of cancer patients are very obvious, and the treatment is also very complex, and the diagnosis and treatment **** knowledge, guidelines, and even standards formulated based on the current relatively limited medical evidence are not quite able to keep up with the development of medicine. As we all know, the development of medicine is an exploratory science, and many standards, including international practices, are several years old.
The current situation has evolved again, so from the current approved drug indications or written into the guidelines of the medical program is likely to be outdated, then should be based on more sufficient clinical evidence to give patients some of the over-indication, or over-guidelines of the treatment, but also in order to explore the effectiveness of the diagnosis and treatment, and in fact there are a lot of drugs out of the indications after the real effective.
But it is also important to emphasize that clinical pharmacology organizations and ethics committees should strictly monitor that these clinical studies of over-indications and over-guidelines are innovations in clinical care, not over-treatments, and that they are conducted under strict monitoring. It has also been shown that many cancer patients can benefit in such cases.