Asked by: David Burton-Sampson (Labour - Southend West and Leigh)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) encourage the uptake and (a) increase the availability of lung cancer screenings.
Answered by Ashley Dalton - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
To encourage uptake of lung screening, we are directly targeting activity at areas that we know will make a difference. This includes awareness campaigns such as the NHS Help Us, Help You campaign, to increase awareness of cancer symptoms, including lung cancer, and encourage people to get checked.
Latest data shows early diagnosis for lung cancer is eight percentage points higher than pre-pandemic. This improvement has largely been driven by roll out of Lung Cancer Screening Programme. The Lung Cancer Screening Programme is a national screening programme in the National Health Service designed to identify cancers at an earlier stage and has led to over 3,000 more lung cancers being diagnosed at an earlier stage. When fully rolled out, the Lung Cancer Screening Programme will detect around 9,000 cancers earlier each year and support the NHS Long Term plan to detect more cancers earlier.