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 tackle regional disparities in pancreatic cancer survival rates.

Reducing inequalities and variation in cancer treatment is a priority for the Government, as is increasing early cancer diagnosis, which is a key contributor to reducing cancer health inequalities and improving survival rates, as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

The pancreatic cancer clinical audit, led by the Royal College of Surgeons, began in 2021, with the first outcomes expected in 2024. A key aim of the audit is to support services in the National Health Service to stimulate improvements in cancer detection, treatment, and outcomes for patients, including improving survival rates.

To improve early diagnosis, the NHS is implementing non-specific symptom pathways (NSS) for patients who present with vague and non-site specific symptoms which do not clearly align to a tumour type. This includes symptoms of pancreatic cancer. By March 2024, the NSS programme will achieve full population coverage across England for non-specific symptom pathways as set out in the 2023/24 NHS Operational Planning Guidance.

On 24 January 2023, the Government announced that it will publish a Major Conditions Strategy. The strategy will cover cancer as one of the six conditions that contribute most to morbidity and mortality across the population in England. The strategy will apply a geographical lens to each condition to address regional disparities in health outcomes, supporting the levelling up mission to narrow the gap in healthy life expectancy by 2030.  We published the Major Conditions Strategy Case for Change and Our Strategic Framework on 14 August 2023 which sets out our approach to making the choices over the next five years that will deliver the most value in facing the health challenges of today and of the decades ahead, including for cancer.