LIKE many other British cancer sufferers before him, Rob Ellert travelled to one of America’s leading hospitals to give himself a better chance of survival.

Now in remission, he is so determined that National Health Service patients should no longer die unnecessarily that he has enlisted Lord Darzi, the health minister, to transfer best practice across the Atlantic. He has also set up a charity to promote American-style cancer treatment in Britain.

Ellert, a 61-year-old businessman, is part of a movement demanding a wholesale overhaul of NHS treatment of the disease. It is led by Professor Karol Sikora and Dr Maurice Slevin, two world-leading cancer experts who are based in Britain. They have set out the reforms needed by the NHS.

Figures published last week in the journal The Lancet Oncology showed that survival rates in this country are among the lowest in Europe, on a par with Poland.

Sikora, a former chief of the World Health Organisation cancer unit and now medical director of CancerPartnersUK, a private company, has taken senior Department of Health (DoH) officials on a tour of American cancer centres in the hope that they will bring back ideas to boost British survival rates.

He and Slevin, a consultant at the London Oncology Clinic, a private centre, have devised an action plan which they argue can be implemented within existing NHS budgets:

- NHS patients must be referred to a consultant within 24 hours of a GP suspecting cancer. At present, urgent cases are referred within 14 days, but many NHS cancer patients do not see a specialist for several weeks

- Scans and biopsies to determine how far a cancer has spread should be carried out within three days. At present, NHS patients can wait months.

- Surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy should begin within one week of diagnosis. At present, NHS patients can wait two months for treatment.

- Patients should be monitored weekly by a consultant during treatment to detect immediately if it is not working.

- Patients should be given wider access to powerful new medicines.

- Patients should receive the correct amount of radiotherapy at the correct time. A shortage of radiotherapy in Britain means that NHS patients face long delays and may not receive the correct amount of radiation.

- Patients should be treated in the evenings and at weekends to cut queues. In the NHS, expensive equipment is often switched off after 5pm.

Although the NHS has seen some improvements since the introduction of its cancer plan in 2000, experts believe that its targets are not sufficiently ambitious.

Sikora said: “There should be no delays for cancer treatment. A 62-day wait in the NHS is laughable. Patients can be waiting weeks for scans and months for radiotherapy. In Europe and the US this would all happen within 24 to 48 hours.”

Anni Matthews, 53, who is fighting breast cancer, was told by British doctors in February 2003 that she would be lucky to live until the Christmas of that year. Matthews, a former property company director, increased her chances of survival by travelling to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachu-setts, where her treatment was helped by new “wonder drugs”.

Matthews said: “The Food and Drug Administration [FDA] is known to be very pernickety about licensing new drugs due to fears of legal action. If the FDA approves a new cancer drug, why is there such a delay before it is available to British patients?”

The DoH said: “Last November we announced that we were developing a cancer reform strategy . . . We expect to publish the strategy by the end of the year.”

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