Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

The House will know of my hon. Friend’s consistent support, through the all-party group, for patients with cancer. I entirely agree that a number of proxy measures and process measures will be relevant in the context of the commissioning outcomes framework. There may be measures that are attributable to CCGs individually in some respects. For example, the quality of life of people living with long-term conditions, to which I referred, would be relevant to a small population. For other measures, however, it may be appropriate for the CCGs to be held to account at the level of, for example, a cancer network, using cancer registry data.

[Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)]

The considerable improvement and focus on breast, lung and bowel cancer is very welcome, but groups campaigning on prostate and ovarian cancer are extremely worried about both the lack of update guidance and the failure to reverse premature death, especially in ovarian cancer, over the last 30 years. Has the Secretary of State anything new to tell us about the direction in these areas?

[Mr Lansley]

The right hon. Gentleman will doubtless be aware that we published a quality standard for ovarian cancer, and that the Minister of State, Department of Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), published the outcomes strategy for cancer, which will have been relevant to many of the issues to which the right hon. Gentleman refers. I continue to look forward to the results of a major trial on screening for ovarian cancer, but I am afraid that I anticipate that we shall not be able to see the results and recommendations for nearly three years.