Patient Care

The NCI registry, over a 23 year period (1970 – 1993), included a total of 1,057,733 patient services, comprising 122,099 new cancer patients, 50,399 admitted patients, and 935,634 outpatient visits. About 38% of patients came from the Cairo metropolitan area, 40% from lower Egypt, and 22% from upper Egypt. About 65% of patients are treated free of charge and private patients generally have health insurance which covers their cost.
The present hospital of 550 beds developed in stages. It is now the largest cancer hospital in the Middle East. In 1989, the old NCI hospital was renovated at a cost of 6.6 million Egyptian pounds, and in 1993, a new 280 bed hospital was opened, permitting more patients to be served. The total cost of the new hospital was 83.5 million (44.5 million from the Egyptian government, 25 million from foreign grants and 14 million from public donations). This project received valuable support from the USAID program of the American government, the European Union, and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). With these successive enlargements the number of new patients rapidly doubled, while the number of outpatient visits increased approximately ten fold. In 1999, just ten years later, 18,000 new patients/year were seen at the NCI, and the number of outpatient visits totaled approximately 140,000 visits/year.
At the present time, the hospital includes a broad array of medical services. There are 10 operating theatres, an intensive care and recovery unit (36 beds), adult and pediatric medical oncology units, a pain control clinic, and a bone marrow transplantation unit. Radiotherapy facilities include three linear accelerators, three cobalt machines, two simulators, one deep X-ray therapy machine, and interstitial therapy after loading capabilities. There is a nuclear medicine unit and a radio diagnosis department equipped with standard x-ray facilities, mammography, computerized tomographic scanning, ultrasonography, and magnetic resonance imagining. There is a diagnostic endoscopy unit, several clinical pharmacy units, clinical pathology laboratories, a blood bank, a laboratory of surgical pathology, a laboratory of cytopathology, a cancer registration and epidemiology unit, a department of cancer biology, an electron microscopy unit and an experimental surgery unit associated with an animal house.