Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) increasing public awareness of the symptoms of, (b) provide timely access to (i) diagnostic tests and (ii) treatments for and (c) otherwise take steps to improve early diagnosis rates for ovarian cancer.

NHS England runs Help Us Help You campaigns to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms and address barriers to acting on them, to encourage people to come forward as soon as possible to see their general practitioner. The campaigns focus on a range of symptoms, including symptoms of ovarian cancer, as well as encouraging body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an early point. Previous phases of the campaign have focused on abdominal symptoms which, among other abdominal cancers, can be indicative of ovarian cancer.

It is a priority for the Government to support the National Health Service to diagnose cancer, including ovarian cancer, as quickly as possible, to treat it faster, and to improve outcomes. This is supported by NHS England’s key ambition on cancer to meet the Faster Diagnosis Standard, which sets a target of 28 days from urgent referral by a general practitioner or screening programme to patients being told that they have cancer, or that cancer is ruled out.

To ensure women have access to the best treatment for ovarian cancer, NHS England commissioned an audit on ovarian cancer. The aim of the audit is to provide timely evidence for cancer service providers of where patterns of care in England may vary, to increase consistency of access to treatments, and help stimulate improvements in cancer treatment and outcomes for patients.

Lord Darzi’s report has set out the scale of the challenges we face in fixing the NHS and the need to improve cancer waiting-time performance and cancer survival. In particular, he has highlighted the need to improve the number of patients starting their treatment within 62 days of referral and to increase the number of patients diagnosed at an earlier stage.

The Government will set out any further priorities on cancer, including on early diagnosis, in a national cancer plan. The national cancer plan will include further details on how we will improve outcomes for cancer patients, as well as speeding up diagnosis and treatment, ensuring patients have access to the latest treatments and technology, and ultimately bringing this country’s cancer survival rates back up to the standards of the best in the world.