2024-03-21 16:56:00
Milan, 21 March. (Adnkronos Health) – “We worked with the Regions to make the presence of breast care centers on the national territory increasingly widespread”. Centers “which by 2022, according to our data, will number 194. And despite widespread opinion, they are not all concentrated in the North, but are now spread across the entire national territory”. This was underlined by the Minister of Health Orazio Schillaci, speaking today at the dicastery at the conference ‘The network of Breast Units’. Among others, the European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety Stella Kyriakides also participated in the event.
“With regards to the volume of activity – added the minister – out of 422 facilities that perform surgery for breast cancer, there are 126 hospitals that respect the standard of at least 135 operations per year, equal to 30% of all facilities who carry out this service. Precisely to reverse the trend, the Ministry of Health has adopted a strategy to encourage the Regions to concentrate the experience in the identified centres, reducing the fragmentation of the healthcare offer for breast cancer. A policy which has already given the first results: from 2019 to 2022 – highlighted Schillaci – we have reduced the number of hospitals carrying out this type of operation by 22%. Furthermore, the involvement of the network of breast centers in mammographic screening programs has reduced the dispersion of patients, with a trend of increasing access to the Breast Units”.
“In 2023, approximately 56,000 breast cancer diagnoses were estimated in Italy – the minister recalled – which represents the most frequent neoplasm in women and unfortunately the leading cause of death in the age group between 35 and 50. Fortunately However, there is no shortage of positive numbers: the survival figure 5 years after diagnosis is 88% and there are more than 834 thousand women living in Italy after a diagnosis of breast cancer. Possible goals thanks to the enormous progress made by research , which have made increasingly innovative and personalized therapies available, and to the spread of Breast Units which guarantee early diagnosis, surgical interventions according to the highest standards and above all multidisciplinary management which I believe is the best response for a disease such as breast cancer breast care. A model of care that has developed thanks to the impetus of the European Parliament, which since the end of the 90s and especially at the beginning of the 2000s has affirmed the right of women suffering from this pathology to be treated in multidisciplinary centers and with specific volumes of activity”.
“Italy has adapted to European indications. The approval of the guidelines on the network of breast centers in 2014 – Schillaci recalled – and the Regulation on hospital standards in 2015. More and more investments have been made to guarantee patients with breast cancer to be treated in structures that respect high volumes of activity, equal to 150 operations per year, and the presence of multidisciplinary and multi-professional teams which are the fundamental requirements for a structure to be defined as a Breast Unit”. The “scientific evidence – the minister remarked – indicates that when these indicators are respected there is an increase in recovery rates, management from the onset of the disease up to specific rehabilitation, a quality of surgical performance, with an increase in percentages of immediate reconstructions and reduction in the number of demolitive interventions. Ensuring that a woman has the possibility of having an immediate breast reconstruction and avoiding breast mutilation means improving her quality of life, investing in her psychological well-being, protecting the dignity of the person” .
“Even in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan – continued Schillaci – there is a decisive contribution in improving healthcare for patients affected by this oncological disease. We know, in fact, how much of a priority it is today to strengthen local medicine to guarantee the integration between territory and hospital. The challenge that Europe poses for us is also to overcome a conceptual vision of healthcare provision based on the contrast between hospital and territory, in the interest of the patient who has the right to local healthcare, capable to respond to health needs in appropriate times, settings and structures”.
“But there is another intervention by the Next Eu Generation on which I would like to focus: that relating to the resources made available to purchase large-scale equipment that guarantees greater reliability and diagnostic safety. Technologies that can help in the early diagnosis of breast cancer the difference, managing to identify even the smallest lesions”, specified the minister, pointing out that “among the requirements required of a Breast Unit there is also the ability to collaborate with national and international research projects”. Because “it is thanks to research that we have made progress in treatments, it is thanks to the work of researchers that many therapies used to overcome breast cancer have a lower rate of toxicity, allow patients to face the pathology with less difficulty and are able to have a better quality of life. Goals that we have achieved in the last decade, unimaginable until a few decades ago. But research must continue. And new conquests will come – concluded Schillaci – if we know how to network at a European level, encouraging the exchange of information, clinical data, expertise, to offer European citizens increasingly innovative treatments and better life prospects and above all access for all to the best possible care”.
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