Health: Pancreatic Cancer

Lord Sharkey Excerpts

Monday 23rd April 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Sharkey]

My Lords, in preparing for this debate, three things struck me with a special force; the first was that 25 per cent of pancreatic cancer patients experience symptoms up to 12 months prior to diagnosis; the second was that nearly 30 per cent of pancreatic cancer patients visited their GP five or more times before diagnosis; the third was the alarming fact that the disease attracts less than 1 per cent of overall cancer research funding. With regard to the first and second areas, this seems to me to suggest very strongly indeed the need for better information to be made available both to the doctor and to the patient. Will the Minister give urgent consideration to putting in place quickly a pilot campaign whose objectives are to increase awareness among both patients and doctors of the possible symptoms of this disease? I know that the Government have done that very successfully for bowel cancer.

The third area is the question of the very low level of research funding for the disease. I realise that it is not a simple matter to increase the funding for one particular disease, no matter how pressing the case may be. In many ways this is because there is an analogue of the market mechanism in operation when it comes to the allocation of research funds. That is not a criticism of what happens in a general sense; I point out only that relying on the normal processes of allocating research funding is unlikely to result in much of an increase for the rarer types of cancer, such as pancreatic cancer, in any reasonable timeframe.

That is why I ask the Minister to see if there is any way of bypassing or supplementing the normal process of funding allocation and to see if there is any way of directly intervening to generate a substantial and urgent increase in funding. I realise that this is not easy, and it is consistent with the Government’s commitment to improve the treatment of cancer in the UK and bringing our survival rates up to those enjoyed by many advanced countries.

I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for giving us the opportunity to debate this vital issue. I hope that the Minister may be able to give sympathetic consideration to the proposals that I have put forward.