Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the merits of improving data collection on metastatic breast cancer patients.
No recent assessment has been made.
Recording of secondary cancer, progression, recurrence and transformation, was introduced in version seven of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD), for diagnoses from 2014. Version nine of the COSD will allow more detail to be recorded about whether a secondary cancer is a progression, recurrence or transformation. It is also designed to make recording more specific and hence improve completeness.