NHS: Cancer Treatments

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a unique, moving and effective debate. I am proud to be able to support the demands of the courageous noble Baroness, Lady Jowell.

In my three minutes I want to focus on two of her demands: early diagnosis and patient rights. Public Health England says:

“Diagnosing cancer earlier is one of the most important ways to improve cancer survival and we know that those patients who have their cancer diagnosed as an emergency have poorer outcomes”.


That is why new screening and diagnostic methods must be made available quickly.

In fact, I am standing here because of screening. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, that I have had two as well; perhaps we should start a club. That shows how far we have come, does it not? Screening does not merely diagnose disease but can sometimes predict the risk of it through identifying gene mutations, as we have heard. Genomic screening can also contribute to treatment decisions by predicting how the tumour will respond to chemotherapy. That can avoid chemotherapy for those patients who will not benefit from it.

Diagnoses of colorectal cancer through the national bowel screening programme remain under 10%. This effective early diagnostic tool is not being used widely enough. Is that because CCGs are not offering the screening, or is it because people are not returning the samples? What are the Government doing to improve those figures?

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, that patients should have a great deal more say in the risks that they are prepared to take, and that adaptive trials should be allowed where they could help. I will not repeat many of the cancer-related examples that we are discussing today, but I shall give the House a non-cancer example of where the system is preventing a patient from receiving medicines that have already been shown to work, to illustrate that the problems that the noble Baroness has identified go wider than cancer.

A small boy, whom I will call A, has rare and serious epilepsy. He was treated, at great expense to the NHS, with powerful pharmaceutical drugs to stop his fits, although some of them were not even licensed for use on children. His condition did not improve and the doctors admitted the drugs could damage his vital organs and shorten his life. His parents heard of a similar case in Holland where a child was being treated successfully with cannabis-based medicines, which were licensed there.

Child A has now been receiving cannabis treatment in The Hague with enormous success. His doctor here is convinced of the safety and efficacy of these medicines, which are not licensed here, but is frightened to treat him with them because he is afraid that the GMC will strike him off. The family can no longer afford to remain in The Hague, yet the Home Office tells me that it will not grant a special licence for the treatment in the UK. This child could die of his fits. His parents would agree in a heartbeat for him to receive the medicines here, even though they are unlicensed. They know the risk is small and the benefits huge. They should have the right to make that decision for their child, just as the cancer patients mentioned by the noble Baroness should have the right to make decisions about risks and about their own treatment. What is the Minister going to do about that?