Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans he has to include blood cancer diagnoses as part of the cancer dashboard.

Public Health England and NHS England developed the first iteration of the cancer dashboard in response to recommendations in the Independent Cancer Taskforce report ‘Achieving world-class cancer outcomes: a strategy for England 2015-2020’. This includes data on breast, colorectal, lung and prostate cancers. Further cancer sites (including blood cancer) were not included because of the risk of making patients identifiable when viewing data for individual hospitals or clinical commissioning groups.

A second iteration of the dashboard is being developed by NHS Digital and NHS England with a wider ambition to include rarer cancers and cancers with a lower incidence, such a blood cancers, as the dashboard develops.