A Quarter of Cancer Patients at Karachi's JPMC Can't Finish Treatment, Doctors Say

About a quarter of cancer patients at Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) in Karachi are unable to complete their treatment, mainly because of cost, doctors said at the hospital's two-day Breastcon 2026 conference, which concluded on October 12.

Dr Ghulam Haider, head of JPMC's oncology department, said complete cancer care — covering surgery, radiotherapy, medicines and injections — costs Rs3 million to Rs4 million, and that managing complications from chemotherapy can push the bill higher still. JPMC provides surgery and radiotherapy free of charge, but newer immunotherapies and targeted medicines fall outside that coverage.

Patients who run out of money, then come back sicker

Haider said cancer care at JPMC leans heavily on philanthropists, charities and Zakat funds, none of which can be counted on consistently. He described a pattern doctors see repeatedly: patients exhaust what support they can gather, stop coming in, and return months later with tumours that have grown substantially larger in the interim. He called for permanent government assistance so patients can finish a course of treatment once they start it, rather than depending on funding that varies month to month — the same kind of out-of-pocket exposure this desk has tracked in household budgets more broadly, where a single large medical bill can undo years of careful saving.

Delay starts before the cost does

Dr Saima Zahoor, assistant professor of medical oncology at JPMC and the conference's co-chair, said more than 60 percent of breast cancer patients face delays in diagnosis or treatment — and that the delay often begins before anyone has discussed a bill. "Social pressure, fear, misconceptions and treatment costs contribute to these delays," she said, pointing to patients who fear a biopsy itself will spread the cancer and turn to alternative treatments instead. She added that HER2-positive breast cancer, which can require expensive targeted medicines, sometimes pushes patients toward Baitul Mal or private charities for help — a detour that itself delays care.

Dr Syeda Zareen Raza, a JPMC general surgeon, said some patients are candidates for breast-conserving or oncoplastic surgery, but fears about appearance, hair loss and social attitudes toward the disease discourage people from pursuing treatment at all, independent of what it costs.

What other hospitals are asking for

Dr Sana Zeeshan of Aga Khan University Hospital called for a national breast cancer registry that would combine records from public, private and charitable hospitals, tracking disease stage, treatment, recurrence and survival in one place — something Pakistan's fragmented hospital data currently makes difficult to assemble. Dr Najeeb Naimatullah of Shaukat Khanum Hospital asked for organised screening programmes, wider access to quality local and generic medicines, and treatment plans built around what a patient can actually afford, rather than a single standard protocol regardless of cost. Dr Tariq Rafi, chairman of the Sindh Higher Education Commission and the conference's chief guest, urged closer cooperation between institutions on screening and research, and offered the commission's funding support to researchers working on the disease.

The financing gap this points back to

The pattern doctors described at Breastcon mirrors a wider problem in Pakistani health financing: public spending on health remains low relative to need, pushing a disproportionate share of serious illness costs directly onto patients and their families, a dynamic this desk has traced in maternal health outcomes as well. For cancer specifically, the gap shows up not as a missing diagnosis or a missing surgeon, but as a treatment that starts, stalls for lack of money, and resumes later against a larger tumour — a sequence that is, by definition, more expensive and less likely to succeed than finishing the course the first time.

Build Better Pakistan's Health Desk covers public health financing and access across the country.