Hi Everyone,
My mum who is currently undergoing chemo of Paclitaxel in hospital has decided to reschedule her next appointment due to coronavirus, and possibly until much later in the year. We saw on the gov.uk website it says NHS England will directly contact / send letter to active chemotherapy patients w/c 23 March, outlining more stringent measures to be safe.
We feel we want more information before continuing chemo, because walking into a hospital or being in direct contact with staff or people feels so risky right now, because at the time of writing this, NHS staff are not being tested for the virus. Friends working in the NHS are very concerned about not being tested, and the risk of passing it on.
Has anyone received contact or a letter yet, or know anything more about it? If you have please let me know!
We phoned her cancer care team today and they knew nothing about NHS contacting active chemo patients, so I said we had seen it on gov.uk website. We will try to speak to her oncologist tomorrow for more information.
Here is the paragraph which talks about the NHS directly contacting these people:
"Note: there are some clinical conditions which put people at even higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19. If you are in this category, next week the NHS in England will directly contact you with advice the more stringent measures you should take in order to keep yourself and others safe. For now, you should rigorously follow the social distancing advice in full, outlined below.
People falling into this group are those who may be at particular risk due to complex health problems such as:
- people who have received an organ transplant and remain on ongoing immunosuppression medication
- people with cancer who are undergoing active chemotherapy or radiotherapy
- people with cancers of the blood or bone marrow such as leukaemia who are at any stage of treatment
- people with severe chest conditions such as cystic fibrosis or severe asthma (requiring hospital admissions or courses of steroid tablets)
- people with severe diseases of body systems, such as severe kidney disease (dialysis)"
