The Department of Radiotherapy, Regional Cancer Centre, PGIMER, Chandigarh will be raising cancer awareness in the hospital through posters and dialogue with different groups of people. We join hands with the department of Dietetics, Community Medicine and the Punjab University in this endeavor. We also take this opportunity to thank our patients for their patience and faith in us which helped us to provide cancer directed service throughout the pandemic. It must be highlighted that we did not stop our services even for a day. While managing the COVID patients was the first priority, we realized that the cancer in our patients would not wait till the end of pandemic. Hence, we maintained our services, though limited due to logistic issues, after taking due precautions. The entire department worked as one in order to provide the much needed health care to cancer patients. On World Cancer Day, we re-dedicate our services to our patients and hope the situation improves for the better.
The lockdown affected patient care as many could not reach the hospital or were misinformed. The institute facilitated tele-consultation and patients are now seen by appointment. Despite the initial difficulties, the number of cancer patients treated have steadily increased. We provide the details of services provided by our team from April 2020 – January 2021.
Total no. of patients seen: 20525
No. of brachytherapy: 270
No. of day care patients: 9587
Medical Oncology OPD patients: 2972
Palliative care: 2385 + 139 Hospice admissions
Tele-consultations: approx. 2500 per month
We published our experience of management of cancer patients during the initial part of COVID-19 pandemic.
• A total of 160 patients were treated in our department during this study period.
• 44.4% of patients on treatment had associated co-morbidities that conferred added challenge in management
• 76% patients continued treatment with their initial plan of radiotherapy or chemotherapy
• Treatment plans were prioritized based on the severity of clinical symptoms and whether the expected outcome would significantly affect their survival and quality of life.
• Patients were monitored for the development of treatment-related toxicities and COVID-19-related symptoms
