Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to achieve national coverage of the NHS’ Non-Specific Symptom (NSS) diagnostic pathways for blood cancer.

It is a priority for the Government to support the National Health Service to diagnose cancer, including blood cancer, as early and as quickly as possible, and to treat it faster, to improve outcomes.

In addition to improving cancer waiting time performance, the NHS has implemented non-specific symptom pathways for patients who present with vague and non-site-specific symptoms, which do not clearly align to a tumour type. This includes leukaemia, which the national evaluation found was one of the most common cancers diagnosed via these pathways. We are close to national coverage for NSS pathways, with 115 out of the 121 NSS services being live nationally.