The national cancer programme in Romania: Challenges in a low-resource healthcare system

Results show that current cancer policies in Romania are focusing on treatment and screening, less on prevention, surveillance, research and rehabilitation and not at all on palliative care. Despite the NPC development in the period considered, substantial difficulties hinder the achievement of the full potential of the programme. The analysis reveals an erratic vision underpinning the cancer programme and a complete lack of objective measures of the NPC results. Four lessons are derived from this analysis and can inform cancer policies in similar national contexts: the implementation of cancer registries for a better planning of cancer policies, involving other actors (such as NGOs) in the fight against cancer, the necessity for having objective assessments of the status of policy implementation and the need to include measures of palliation in the future policies.