Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his Department's policy to ensure that all general practice clinicians can access readily available training on the signs and symptoms of a brain tumour.

NHS England is delivering a range of interventions to support general practitioners in diagnosing brain cancer earlier. In April 2020 they introduced the ‘early cancer diagnosis service specification’ for Primary Care Networks (PCNs). This is designed to support improvements in rates of early cancer diagnosis by requiring PCNs to review the quality of their practices’ referrals for suspected cancer and take steps to improve them.

NHS England is making funding available to embed clinical decision support tools within general practice and give access to a wider range of diagnostic tests. These tools and tests are expected to support the earlier detection of a range of cancers including brain cancer. A brain cancer education module is freely available on ‘Gateway C’, which offers online and face-to-face training on cancer symptoms for primary care clinicians.