Secondary Breast Cancer

Jo Churchill Excerpts

Wednesday 21st October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Jo Churchill (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend—sorry, my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Craig Tracey); I just gave him a promotion—for securing the debate.

I come to this with a slightly different hat on. As I prepared to speak, I tried to decide whether the word “cancer” or “secondary” was the scariest. For me, it is “secondary”. I have had cancer a couple of times, and the scan anxiety that the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) talked of is so real, as is the need for joined-up services and clinical nurse specialists. We need to be able to be a person in the pipeline. Owing to the shortness of time, I will not say a lot of what I was going to say, but I will try to concentrate on what it feels like for the person.

We know the statistics. We know that 50,000 women and men—we must remember that there are men with breast cancer too—get breast cancer per year. The good news for primary breast cancer sufferers is that many of those people are survivors. Victoria Derbyshire is a fine example to us only this morning, in the papers; good luck to her with her battle.

Some of my friends and constituents to whom I have spoken have had secondary or metastatic breast cancer. It sounds hopeless, but it is not. With improved drugs and more targeted and tailored treatment, survival time is longer. Yes, there are 36,000 people living with breast cancer, but it is better quality survival that most of us want. It is about the quality of survival.

I started my journey to becoming an MP by talking in 2010 in one of the rooms in this place about primary cancers and how we had some of the poorest outcomes in Europe. Things are not so much better in 2015. We need to keep our feet to the fire and ensure we push hard on this disease, so that we start to get real progress for primary, and particularly secondary, cancers.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan) mentioned old age but those from various ethnic minorities also have extremely poor outcomes. We must pay heed to that. How can we get better outcomes? The cancer strategy for England calls for improvements from pre-diagnosis to post-treatment. That is vital but we should ensure that patients receive optimum support and interventions so that they can get on with their lives. We need to think about lifestyles and lifetimes, and about which cancer services we need, to enable people to carry on working for as long as they want, so that they feel like people, not like cancer patients. That is the important thing for people living with this disease. We want people to lead healthy, fulfilled and productive lives, whichever stage of the disease they are at. The strategy proposes the development of a national metric of quality of life, underpinned by a robust approach to measurement, which will incentivise the provision of better aftercare interventions.

We want multidisciplinary teams. They really improve outcomes for patients and, when people are diagnosed, they want people other than oncologists. They want to talk to a psychologist as the disease sometimes messes with their heads more than it does with their bodies. That important pipeline is, oh, so needed. There should be robust surveillance systems, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire said. It is important that we know what we know, so that we know how to get to the root cause of the problem.

Since 2011, six breast cancer drugs have been available. There was a debate in this place yesterday about the cancer drugs fund. We need sustainable funding to ensure that women and men get the treatment that they need. Treatment should not be a lottery. In my view, this pot is a sticking plaster that has gone a bit curly around the edges. It needs revising and refreshing. There needs to be an efficient way of moving drugs from the cancer drugs fund into positive and routine commissioning. Currently, it is out of date and not fit for purpose.

I welcome the accelerated access review, which reports at the end of the year, and the cancer drugs fund, but I urge the Government to make some speedy decisions because, as 4 November looms, people are sitting on the edge of decision making, not knowing whether they are likely to get treatment or not. Although we have said that women and men who are on their treatment programme will still receive that treatment, it is not so certain for those who are not yet on those drugs.

We could learn a little from the Scottish Medicines Consortium because, on this, it does some things a little better than we are managing to do. It commissions and moves more swiftly. We could also unblock our pipelines. We are potentially disabling innovative medicines. We need to trial innovative drugs that can be used to prolong life and have a conversation with pharmaceutical companies if England does not want to fall behind in the race to make the medicines of the 21st century.

Research is so important, as is this debate on secondary breast cancer because science will unlock the ability to fight the disease. Geneticists on the 1000 Genomes Project have already discovered more than 100 regions of the genome that contain genetic variants. Work goes on in labs, such as the Genesis Genetics research, targeting who is susceptible and why. If we know people are more susceptible, the better they can be treated. Evidence-based is good but it charges industry and researchers with helping to drive things forward.

As a survivor and someone who has held too many women for whom secondary breast cancer has not offered longevity, I dream of a day when immunotherapy, CyberKnife and the work of drugs companies means that this insidious disease is a has-been. We need a lifetime approach, preventive medicine and preventive care. We need to watch our weight, keep healthy and be active, and the drugs that we need when we need them—in hospital or in the community.