Ovarian cancer patients and oncologists are sounding the alarm about a lack of treatment options, and are hoping Canada’s premiers will take steps to change that.
“Why are they letting people die in Canada of a condition that we can fix?” said Tammy O’Rourke.
The Nova Scotia mother of five from Cape Breton was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer in 2025.
At every turn, she says she felt she was failed by Canada’s health-care system, from scan delays to referral denials.
“For a country that spends hundreds of billions of dollars on what other countries believe is a state of the art socialized health care system, it’s disheartening,” she said.
O’Rourke eventually received HIPEC surgery in Baltimore, Md., a treatment she says she wasn’t offered at home.
A year and $400,000 in out-of-pocket expenses later, her family is breathing a sigh of relief and she is officially cancer-free.
But she isn’t the only ovarian cancer patient left with few options.
“Cure isn’t a word that we get to use very often with that cancer,” said Dr. Jacob McGee, president of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology of Canada.
McGee has been a gynecologic oncologist for more than 14 years and says despite ovarian cancer affecting one in 70 women, there is no diagnostic test for it in Canada.
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He adds there are few successful treatment options for late-stage patients in this country.
“For many patients, the cancer does recur and what ends up happening to patients is they develop something called platinum resistance,” he said.
“When we reach that point, our options are really limited and response rates to treatments that we have available are typically in the 10 to 20 per cent range.”
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, an estimated 3,000 women in Canada will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2026, and an estimated 1,950 will die from it.
McGee believes mortality rates could be mitigated with better access to health care.
“Drugs that patients can receive in the U.S., we’d like our patients to be able to receive it here as well,” he said.
With health care on the docket at the Canadian premiers’ summit in Charlottetown this week, McGee says he would like to see politicians take a serious look at the state of ovarian cancer care nationwide.
“We need funding to push research ahead to answer the question of how we can identify these cancers at an earlier stage,” he said.
“We would love better access to clinical trials … and then we need better interventions for the disease as things move along and particularly once platinum resistance is achieved.”
Coupled with better surgery access, O’Rourke hopes these changes will save other Canadian women from the trauma her family endured.
“I shouldn’t be waiting two and a half years for a hysterectomy. I shouldn’t be waiting over 12 weeks for an urgent ultrasound,” she said. “I should be given the option of HIPEC surgery … women’s health matters.”
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