Ovarian Cancer: Diagnosis and Treatment

John Lamont Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) on securing this important debate and on speaking so compassionately and movingly about his constituents and, indeed, his family.

Like other hon. Members present, I am sure, I was inundated with emails and correspondence from constituents urging me to take part in the debate, so I want to make a few remarks on their behalf. Of course, those emails come from the lucky ones—the women who, like Amanda Gilham from Makerstoun in my constituency, benefited from timely diagnosis and treatment. Amanda was totally unaware that she had ovarian cancer and was diagnosed only because she was fortunate enough to be given a blood test, as her GP suspected that something else entirely was wrong.

When talking about statistics, it is important to remember that the numbers on spreadsheets represent people—our constituents—and, in the case of ovarian cancer, grandmothers, mothers and sometimes daughters. Clearly, early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to tackling ovarian cancer, as they are to tackling all types of cancer. If ovarian cancer is found early, the five-year survival rate is 90%, compared with 4% if it is found late. Although survival rates have doubled in the past 40 years, survival rates in the United Kingdom are lower than the European average, and still not enough people are diagnosed early.

The NHS in Scotland is of course entirely devolved and therefore the responsibility of the Scottish National party Government. I want to spend a little time talking about the situation in Scotland and the circumstances that my constituents have to experience. Patients in Scotland are being let down. Much more needs to be done to improve diagnosis and treatment. This summer, for example, the Scottish Medicines Consortium approved the use of niraparib, but only for women without a gene mutation that affects about one fifth of women living with ovarian cancer. That restriction does not apply in England, meaning that women with a BRCA gene mutation in England and Wales have more treatment options than their counterparts north of the border, in Scotland. A postcode lottery for accessing life-enhancing drugs is unacceptable. I agree with Ovarian Cancer Action that women in Scotland deserve better.

Women in Scotland also deserve better in terms of the time that it takes to receive a diagnosis and treatment. Scotland’s cancer treatment waiting times are at their worst in six years. Only 87% of patients with ovarian cancer started treatment within 62 days of referral. In response, the Scottish Government have admitted that that is “simply not good enough”. Just last week, the Scottish Government announced that they were not planning on meeting their own diagnosis target until at least 2021. That was spun as a new “three-year plan” to meet waiting time targets—something that was supposed to be good news. Given that the SNP has been in charge of the NHS in Scotland for the past 10 years, the Scottish Government’s record, particularly on cancer treatment, deserves further scrutiny. I hope that some of the extra £2 billion a year that the Scottish Government will be receiving to spend on the NHS, thanks to yesterday’s Budget, can be put to good use to reduce those waiting times.

Ovarian cancer is not the most common type of cancer in the United Kingdom and is not easily diagnosed at the moment, but the impact of early diagnosis is significant. I again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire on securing this important debate. I support the efforts across the United Kingdom to improve diagnosis and treatment of this terrible disease.