More than half of the cancer patients in OZ go without despite chemotherapy's success rate being just about 50 per cent.

A survey stated that there was a gap between the total number of cancer patients chemotherapy could help and those who were actually getting it. According to the survey conducted by According associate Professor Bogda Koczwara, from the Medical Oncology Group of Australia, 19 per cent of all those diagnosed with cancer were receiving chemotherapy.

He said, "Of all the cancer diagnosed in Australia, roughly half would derive a benefit from chemotherapy. What we've seen in our survey is less than half of those patients receive chemotherapy, so rather than one in two patients we're seeing about one in five patients."

Dr Koczwara said chemotherapy utilisation rate that was clearly too low and the reason was scarcity of services plus a shortage of oncologists.

The doctor added that the problem could worsen in the coming time and said that presently there was a shortage of up to 157 full-time oncologists.