Over 22,000 people are diagnosed with cancer every year in Croatia, and over 14,000 of them lose the battle with the disease, the Croatian Public Health Institute (HZJZ) reported.

On average, some 60 people are diagnosed with some form of cancer every day, HZJZ said.

A working group of some 100 experts, led by Dr Eduard Vrdoljak, one of nation’s biggest oncology experts, is drafting a national plan for fighting cancer, which should be finished soon and open for public debate in the next few months, the Tportal news site reported.

“We don’t have a plan for fighting the biggest health threat of the modern age, which is cancer. For me, that is alarming, and we need a plan to battle this disease since our success rate is the worst in all of Europe,” said Dr Vrdoljak from the Oncology and Radiotherapy Department in the University Hospital Split.

Since the 1990s, the number of people diagnosed with cancer increases every year in Croatia, with increasingly fatal results, which is the complete opposite to trends in developed countries.

Croatia and Hungary have the highest cancer mortality rates in all of EU.

According to data by The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, Croatia is among the five European countries with the lowest survival rates for lung cancer, which only 10 percent patients survive, prostate cancer (81 percent), stomach (20 percent), colon (51 percent, rectal 48 percent), and adult myeloid leukemia (32 percent).

Croatia is also at the bottom of the list of survival rates of other commonly diagnosed types of cancer, such as breast (79 percent), skin melanoma (77 percent), and cervical cancer (63 percent), Tportal news portal reported.

Small organisational improvements are enough to dramatically improve the statistic, said Dr Vrdoljak.

“By introducing a multidisciplinary approach we can improve the success rate by some 10 percent. Instead of one doctor deciding on the fate of one patient, we can introduce a rule that a patient must be examined by a multidisciplinary team,” he said.

Under the plan, each patient would be treated by a team of five, seven or ten doctors.

Another step would be to form a national cancer database. There is no such database in Croatia so it is impossible to know how effective individual institutions are and we cannot compare our success rate with the world. It is nearly impossible to estimate how effective a new medicine was and whether we should continue using it, Vrdoljak said.

Follow N1 via mobile apps for Android | iPhone/iPad | Windows| and social media on Twitter | Facebook.