Health: Cancer

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin]

My Lords, I ask the leave of the House to take a couple of minutes to speak in the gap. In doing so, I declare an interest as the patron of the Breast Cancer Campaign and a founding fellow of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. Perhaps more relevantly, given today’s debate, I also declare an interest as someone supporting both my sister and my niece through their own cancer treatments at the moment.

This has been a truly fabulous debate in which noble Lords have touched on almost every aspect of concern around cancer. It has thrown up some significant and challenging questions for the Minister to address, so I do not want to impinge on his time. However, I am particularly concerned about the whole question of the reorganisation of the NHS. Why are focusing our resources—£3 billion in estimate—on that? As the noble Lord, Lord Colwyn, pointed out, it is a time when there are challenges for the cost of care going forward.

Many speakers talked about breast cancer and the improvements that we have seen in outcomes for the 45,000 patients diagnosed with it every year. The noble Lord, Lord Howard, spoke eloquently about his father’s breast cancer. He has personally raised awareness of breast cancer among men; 300 men are diagnosed with it every year. Those improvements have come about because of early diagnosis and awareness-raising by thousands of charity activists. However, also important have been screening and improvements in treatment, most notably because of progress in research but also because of a greater focus on improving service delivery.

I have two questions for the Minister. The first is very much about screening. In the 2007 Cancer Reform Strategy, there was a commitment to ensure that all breast screening units in England had at least one digital mammography set by 2010. I hope that he can update me on progress with delivery of that new technology, which is much more flexible. Secondly, how will the Government continue to work in partnership with charities and voluntary sector organisations to continue to improve the development of infrastructure research projects such as the Breast Cancer Campaign’s national tissue bank—a proposal made following a gap analysis which looked at the barriers to research and how to improve outcomes for people with breast cancer?