"It was really bad – we had patients dying on the waiting lists – politicians were getting desperate."
Jesper Fisker, chief executive of the Danish Cancer Society, is looking back 25 years - to the moment Denmark decided to transform its approach to treating cancer.
At that point, he says, the country did not have a strong record.
"It was a disaster," he recalls. "We saw Danish patients out of their own pocket paying for tickets to China to get all sorts of treatments – endangering their health."
Some went to private hospitals in Germany that offered new treatments unavailable in Denmark.
