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 help (a) raise awareness of the symptoms and (b) reduce the number of misdiagnoses of pancreatic cancer.

NHS England is already taking steps to deliver a range of interventions to improve awareness of pancreatic cancer symptoms. 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 pancreatic cancer, as well as encouraging body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an early point.

NHS England is also working with Pancreatic Cancer UK to develop a public-facing Family History Checker, which enables people, and their families, affected by pancreatic cancer to self-assess if they have inherited risk. People identified of being at risk are referred directly to the European Registry of Hereditary Pancreatic Diseases research trail, which aims to understand inherited conditions of the pancreas. Referrals to the trail can be made by any healthcare professional across all health sectors, or by individuals via self-referral.

Improving early diagnosis and reducing misdiagnosis of cancer is a priority for NHS England. The Department is committed to improving waiting times for cancer treatment across England. We will start by delivering an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week, as the first step to ensuring early diagnosis and faster treatment. To help increase cancer diagnosis rates, we are continuing with the roll out of Community Diagnostic Centres to ensure that patients can access the diagnostic tests they need as quickly as possible. The National Health Service is improving pathways to get people diagnosed faster once they are referred, and is looking into alternative routes into the system, including non-specific symptom pathways for patients who do not fit clearly into a single urgent cancer referral pathway, but who are at risk of being diagnosed with cancer. This will help support faster pancreatic cancer diagnosis and seek to prevent misdiagnosis.