Health: Cancer

Lord Alderdice Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mawhinney]

My Lords—

[Lord Alderdice]

My noble friend introduced the question of diagnosis, which is increasingly a multi-professional matter, involving pathologists, surgeons, radiologists and so on. This seems self-evidently a good thing. However, is the department accumulating evidence to show that it is actually improving the outcomes? It is of course an expensive procedure to involve so many senior professionals together.

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend is quite right. It does involve often a number of senior clinicians. The key to diagnosis, however, is to get in early, as I am sure he would recognise. The outcomes strategy commits us to saving the additional 5,000 lives very largely through additional identification of early cancer. In fact, 3,000 of the 5,000 lives that we are hoping to save will be saved, we hope, by earlier diagnosis. A good example of that is that over 90 per cent of bowel cancer patients diagnosed with the earliest stage of the disease survive five years from diagnosis, compared to only 6.6 per cent of those diagnosed with the advanced disease.