Three additional specialised centres to treat children diagnosed with cancer will be opened in Belgium from 2027. One of the new centres may be located in Brussels.
Between 350 and 400 children in Belgium are diagnosed with cancer annually. Because of this relatively 'low' number, combining expertise on this disease in young people can be interesting from a medical point of view. According to international research, a hospital has to make at least 100 cancer diagnoses in children every year to build up sufficient expertise about how to best treat the illness.
There are already seven Belgian hospitals with a paediatric oncology department, but the Federal Council of Ministers decided last week to move towards a limited number of reference centres for paediatric oncology from 2027, De Morgen reported.
"Childhood cancer is a tangle of over 60 different subtypes. It has become unsustainable for all those small teams to retrain in each domain," said haemato-oncologist Barbara De Moerloose (UZ Gent).
Location yet to be determined
The idea is that, by pooling expertise and resources in three of the country's major hospitals to create a specialised centre, care can be further improved. It is not yet known which hospitals will be involved, but oncologists have proposed two Dutch-speaking centres and one French-speaking reference centre.
In Flanders, based on their current resources and knowledge, the university hospitals of Ghent and Leuven seem to be in pole position, to the detriment of Antwerp. In turn, the Brussels university hospitals Saint-Luc (UCL) and Erasme (ULB) are ahead of those in Liège.
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The centres will be responsible for diagnosis, drawing up a treatment plan, operations and other complex procedures such as bone marrow transplants for each patient. Follow-up treatments such as rehabilitation and chemotherapy will be able to take place in satellite centres closer to home. In the Netherlands, such a system for children who are diagnosed with cancer has already been in place since 2018.
However, Thomas Gevaert (President of doctors' union ASGB/Cartel) pointed to possible pitfalls, stating that the reference centres may take on too much of the pre- and post-treatment work themselves, thus undermining regional expertise. Questions have also been raised about the need for extra support for families who will have to commute further.
