President Gabriel Boric received a letter from the “Voice of Patients” foundation asking him to speed up the implementation of the National Cancer Law.
have elapsed thousand days since the enactment of the National Cancer Law. Since August 26, 2020, the legislation establishes a series of resources for the planning, development, and execution of various public policies to deal with this disease, which is one of the leading causes of death for Chileans.
However, to date it has not yet been implemented, so the “Voice of Patients” foundation, together with a group of parliamentarians, went to La Moneda to deliver a request to President Gabriel Boric requesting to expedite the start-up of the regulations and address waiting lists as a health alert.
Víctor Flores, president of the oncological foundation “La Voz de los Pacientes”, commented that “one thousand days have passed since the non-implementation of the National Cancer Law, which today afflicts us considerably, having more than 15 thousand people on waiting lists. We presented a letter to the president requesting, as he did in his campaign commitment, to join for the patients who are having a hard time today by this public health system that is stuck. We have a huge crisis in cancer and we need the implementation of this law, as well as that a health alert be declared, as was done in COVID-19″.
Deputy Camila Flores (RN) stressed that “we have more than 15,000 people with cancer nationwide, who know they are sick and see how their chances of life are deteriorating with the passing of days, precisely because of the non-implementation of this standard. As parliamentarians, we want to accompany this foundation that celebrated when we managed to advance in Congress in this transversally supported law, but that today the expectations that this will be implemented are truncated. There are people, at least 1,500 in the Valparaíso region, who know they have cancer and to this day have not received any treatment for it.”
Parliamentarian Carla Morales added: “There are thousands of women who are dying from breast cancer, who are not diagnosed on time and in a timely manner, as the GES says, which has to be financed to provide care from the public system and also private. There are thousands of women who are dying today also from cervical cancer, which is a reality in our regions. We call on the Government to empathize with the families and those patients who are diagnosed, to apply all public policies so that people can receive quality care.
