There will be three hospitals for pediatric cancer: bundling expertise should lead to better care | Domestic

The Federal Council of Ministers decided on Friday to move towards a limited number of reference centers for pediatric oncology from 2027. Cancer in children is a disease of small numbers – there are about 350 to 400 new patients every year – and therefore a concentration of expertise will lead to better leading care is the idea behind it. A similar reform is already in place for pancreatic and esophageal cancer.

There are currently seven Belgian hospitals with a pediatric oncology department. However, evolution within the field is causing this ‘small scale’ to take its revenge, says hemato-oncologist Barbara De Moerloose (UZ Ghent) in the newspaper. “Childhood cancer is a tangle of more than sixty different subtypes. It has become untenable for all those small teams to train in every domain.”

In concrete terms, in the future, reference centers must be responsible for the diagnosis, drawing up a treatment plan and surgery or other complicated interventions for every patient. Patients will be able to go to satellite centers closer to home for rehabilitation or chemotherapy, among other things. Minister of Health Frank Vandenbroucke (Vooruit) points to the Netherlands as a shining example.