Earlier Cancer Diagnosis: NHS Finances

Debate between Paul Beresford and John Baron

Tuesday 18th October 2016 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I must of course declare that I am a dentist and so have considerable professional interest in the subject, although it is rare that I am in the surgery. I am also chair of the all-party group on skin, and one might think that diagnosing skin cancer is fairly obvious, in particular given that skin problems are a major concern of GPs. However, one of the things we soon discovered was that undergraduate tuition time on skin conditions is extremely short—often a week or two weeks, which are frequently used by undergraduates, as I understand it, as an opportunity to go away, rather than to attend. If the education of GPs and doctors was better and reinforced by continuing professional development, we might get better results on skin cancer.

[Mr Baron]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention.

We have been successful in getting the one-year figures into the DNA of the NHS, but there is no point having the tools in the toolkit if we do not use them, and one thing we are looking carefully at is the lines of accountability. We acknowledge that we are pushing at an open door—the Government have kindly accepted the need for the one-year figures—but there is still a very long way to travel. The latest Ofsted-style ratings have maintained the focus on survival rates, and yet those ratings still found that eight out of 10 CCGs must improve. That shows the scale of the challenge and the extent to which we need to raise our game.