Private labs and hospitals not cooperating for cancer registry

Indian Council of Medical Research has received only one-third information and remaining is being withheld by private institutions for their vested interests, the sources said here.

Manjeet Singh Bal, Principal Investigator of Population Based Cancer Registries of Punjab, confirmed that ICMR had received only 40 per cent information of cancer patients.

He said private institutions were one of the reasons for this, but there were other reasons also for less inflow of information.

He said many private institutions situated in remote areas of Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Ferozepur, Patiala districts were also not cooperating and there was a need to create more awareness about the programme.

New data being made available, after the state government initiated steps to facilitate a Cancer Atlas, is throwing up new patterns of the deadly disease among people, he said.

"So far, the department of pathology, Government Medical College, Patiala has registered 3,900 cancer patients from across the state in the past three years," he said.

Meanwhile, the ICMR has written to the Punjab government to mobilise the private diagnostic laboratories and hospitals to timely report details of cancer patients.

The project officer of National Cancer Registry Programme of ICMR Bangalore A Nandakumar has urged the Punjab government to call a meeting of health officials who have been regulating private diagnostic laboratories and hospitals in the state.

The Punjab government had issued a notification in October last and made it mandatory for all public and private hospitals, labs, institutions into diagnosis or treatment, to report online details of cancer patient within a week of diagnosis or suspicion.