Listen up, folks, we’ve got something important to talk about – it’s about cancer care during this huge, this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve been looking at how things changed, especially when it comes to the care people get at the end of their lives. We’re talking about the big stuff here, the kind of care that might not be right when someone’s time is running out.

We did a massive study, a retrospective one, with all the data from the Netherlands. We’re not playing around – we looked at over 112,000 cancer patients who passed away from 2018 to 2021. And guess what we found? During the pandemic, fewer patients got what we might call inappropriate care in their last month. That’s right, during the first peak of COVID-19, the numbers dropped from 26% to 22.4%. We crunched the numbers, ran the regression analysis, and it’s clear – the odds were lower during the pandemic.

Now, we’re talking about fewer emergency room visits, shorter hospital stays, less time in intensive care, and fewer hospital deaths. It’s big news. But let’s be clear, we don’t know for sure if this means the quality of care got better, or if it’s just because the pandemic changed how we do things. What we do know is that this is huge. It’s got us asking the big questions about how we can keep giving the right care, especially when resources are tight and we’ve got more and more patients.

So, let’s think about it – maybe some of these changes we made during the pandemic, maybe they’re the key to better care in the future. We’ve got to look at this, we’ve got to learn from it. It’s important, folks. Really important.