Children: Cancer

Baroness Merron Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I completely apologise to all noble Lords. It is important that we look at this issue; I am afraid I will have to write to the noble and gallant Lord with more detail.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

Following on from the question of the noble and gallant Lord about the matter of significant improvements being made in the lives of children with cancer by detecting cancer early and avoiding delays in care, there are of course three components to early diagnosis, with the first being awareness of symptoms by families and primary caregivers. Can the Minister tell your Lordships’ House what assessment has been made of the level of awareness and what is being done to promote that awareness among families and primary caregivers?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Baroness raises an important point about how we raise awareness, and that goes right across not only the population but patients themselves. NHS England and NHS Improvement are developing plans for future phases of their Help Us Help You campaign to raise awareness of key cancer symptoms. To date, the campaign has contributed to the record high levels of urgent cancer referrals that the NHS has seen since March 2021.

Perhaps I may take the opportunity to address the question from the noble and gallant Lord. Covid clearly affected the backlog. One of the things about the waiting list is that now 80% of people on it are waiting for diagnosis. One of the issues we are looking at is how you push out more community diagnosis centres around the country, not only in hospitals but in shopping centres and sports arenas, so that effectively we go to the patient and detect as early as possible. We hope that all that, in conjunction with things such as blood testing and genomic sequencing, will lead to earlier diagnosis.