Earlier Cancer Diagnosis: NHS Finances

David Tredinnick Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered earlier cancer diagnosis and NHS finances.

I thank Mr Speaker for allowing this debate and you, Mr Nuttall, for presiding over it. I also take this opportunity to welcome the Minister to his new post. He has been in it a while now, but this might be his first Westminster Hall debate. We look forward to working with him—he comes highly recommended—and I thank him for accepting the invitation, on behalf of the Secretary of State for Health, who was unable to make the appointment, to speak at our Britain Against Cancer conference in December.

Early diagnosis has been a key theme of the all-party group on cancer for some time. We call it the “magic key” to cancer. If we can drive forward on our rates of early diagnosis, the stage at which we first detect cancer, we can improve survival rates significantly.

I should perhaps briefly explain to the Minister that there is a little history to this involvement. Back in 2009, the all-party group published the report of an inquiry it had conducted into cancer inequalities. We found that patients in the NHS at the one-year point since their cancers were detected stand as much chance of surviving to the five-year point as they would in any other healthcare system. Where we let ourselves down, however, is getting patients to the one-year point. That suggests that the NHS is as good as any other healthcare provider in treating cancers once detected, but poor at detecting them in the first place.

In this country, our survival rates have been ticking up, with the rate of improvement broadly similar to that in other countries, but our survival rates still stand well below those of many other countries. For example, in this country the overall one-year survival rate is about 70% or 71%, but in Sweden it is 82%. That might not sound like a big difference, but overlay that differential with regard to the population of the UK as a whole and it tells us that tens of thousands of lives a year are needlessly being lost because we are diagnosing too late.

We need to focus on early diagnosis, and the Minister is in a unique position to be able to make a real difference to a large number of people if we can get it right. Yes, cancer survival rates are improving, but they are improving around the world and we are still well behind international averages. We welcome the improvements, but we have still not yet seen that kick-up that will allow us to catch up with those international averages.

Our 2009 report came up with, in essence, one recommendation. Reports can always come up with myriad recommendations, but we believe in short reports and, having consulted with the wider cancer community, the good and the great of the cancer world, the charities, patients and so forth, we came up with one recommendation: to ensure that we focus the local NHS, the clinical commissioning groups— primary care trusts then, CCGs now—on their one-year survival rates.

The logic is simple: the earlier we diagnose, the better our one-year survival rates. They are therefore a good measure of how successful we are in diagnosing early. Late diagnosis makes for poor one-year figures, so we get the CCGs to focus on the one-year figure and, if there is a line of accountability there, they will be encouraged to focus on how to improve earlier diagnosis and introduce initiatives promoting earlier diagnosis.

[David Tredinnick (Bosworth) (Con)]

Has my hon. Friend seen the results of the Barts Health NHS Foundation Trust’s 2013 study at Whipps Cross hospital? It showed the effectiveness of complementary therapies in improving symptom control following diagnosis. The three-year study revealed that 90% of people noticed that side-effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy decreased following such treatment, and patients said that their pain, sleep and emotional health improved. Should we make greater use of those supportive therapies as part of the scheme of things?

[Mr Baron]

We certainly have to be inclusive with regards to how we look at treatment generally. As my hon. Friend knows, the all-party group and, indeed, the wider cancer community are looking at such things. He comes to our meetings, and we listen carefully. Questions certainly need to be answered on that front, so he is pushing at an open door. We have an open mind, and we are listening.

Together with the wider cancer community—at the end of the day it has been a team approach—we have been successful in ensuring that CCGs are now held accountable. The one-year survival rates have been included in the delivery dashboard of the assurance framework, and that is very good news. Figures have only been published for the past one or two years, so we are still seeing what is happening with regards to improvements and how CCGs are performing, but at least we have made a start and there is an element of accountability.