Roberts Gisele H, Dunscombe Peter B, Samant Rajiv S
North-eastern Ontario Regional Cancer Centre, Canada Laurentian University, Sudbury, Canada.
Australas Radiol. 2002 Sep;46(3):290-4. doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1673.2002.01062.x.
The study described here was undertaken to quantify the societal cost of radiotherapy in idealized urban and rural populations and, hence, to generate a measure of impediment to access. The costs of centralized, distributed comprehensive and satellite radiotherapy delivery formats were examined by decomposing them into institutional, productivity and geographical components. Our results indicate that centralized radiotherapy imposes the greatest financial burden on the patient population in both urban and rural scenarios. The financial burden faced by patients who must travel for radiotherapy can be interpreted as one component of the overall impediment to access. With advances in remote-monitoring systems, it is possible to maintain technical quality while enhancing patient access. However, the maintenance of professional competence will remain a challenge with a distributed service-delivery format.
本文所述研究旨在量化理想化城市和农村人口接受放射治疗的社会成本，从而得出衡量获得治疗障碍的指标。通过将集中式、分布式综合和卫星放射治疗服务模式的成本分解为机构、生产力和地理组成部分来进行研究。我们的结果表明，在城市和农村两种情况下，集中式放射治疗给患者群体带来的经济负担最大。必须前往外地接受放射治疗的患者所面临的经济负担可被视为获得治疗总体障碍的一个组成部分。随着远程监测系统的进步，在提高患者可及性的同时保持技术质量是有可能的。然而，采用分布式服务提供模式时，维持专业能力仍将是一项挑战。
