Aims
To present the impact of COVID-19 on inpatient cancer care across Victorian health services by comparing the changes in patient and admission numbers for the years 2019 to 2021.
Background
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted cancer care, including delaying diagnoses and treatment, and halting clinical trials. Despite cancer-related services remaining available, utilisation dropped in 2020 due to a range of factors.
In 2020, the Victorian Cancer Registry (VCR) recorded 2420 fewer individual diagnoses, a decline of 7%, likely due to COVID-191. VCR modelling data shows that the decline in cancer incidence reported in 2020 continued into 20212.
Methods
Analysis of cancer activity to understand the change in activity between 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and 2020 and 2021 using a subset of cancer-specific patient data from the Victorian Admitted Episode Dataset (VAED).
Results
Analysis of VAED data shows despite 28290 fewer admissions (-6%) and 16782 fewer patients (-10%) for patients with both malignant and non-malignant neoplasms in Victoria from 2019 to 2020. The most significant decline in admissions were in May (-23%) and August (-18%) which coincided with COVID lockdowns 1 and 2.
In 2021, this trend reversed and admission and patient numbers increased by 8% and 10% respectively when comparing to 2020, but had barely increased when compared to 2019, with lung cancer new admissions down 2.6%. There was growth in admissions mid-year with August having a 29% increase compared to the previous year. October had a slight decrease in admissions (-0.6%) compared to 2020 following 113 days of rolling lockdowns (lockdowns 3 to 6).
Conclusions
Previous trends have shown ~4% annual increase in activity however between 2019 and 2021 there was only 2% increase. Our analysis mirrors evidence that COVID-19 has negatively impacted cancer care which would suggest a surge in activity and late stage cancer diagnoses in 2022.