Workshops with paediatric oncologists

Almost all children with cancer in Switzerland today are treated as part of a clinical trial, either in an ongoing open trial or according to the medical findings from a trial that has already been completed. Older medicines that have been tried and tested for a long time are used, as well as newer substances that doctors hope will bring additional benefits in terms of healing chances or lower toxicity. In every study protocol, both the treatments and all the drugs required for them are precisely specified, and these specifications must be strictly adhered to.

However, paediatric oncologists and parents repeatedly discover that getting health insurance companies to cover the costs of individual drugs can be a laborious process and is sometimes refused altogether. In order to remedy this situation, Childhood Cancer Switzerland organised various workshops with paediatric oncologists in German-speaking Switzerland, French-speaking Switzerland and Ticino in 2020 as a first step to identifying the greatest challenges in this area and jointly developing possible solutions.