Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent discussions he has had on the future of the National Cancer Peer Review Programme.

NHS England is currently reviewing the National Cancer Peer Review programme with a view to considering how its success might be extended into other new areas of specialised commissioning. Regardless of the outcome of this review, cancer peer review will continue to play a critical part of any broader peer review programme NHS England may look to introduce.

The number of visits undertaken by the programme changes based on how many risk visits and how many comprehensive visits are carried out. The highest number of visits completed in any one year since the programme began was 535 in 2012-13, when comprehensive visits to acute oncology were carried out. Generally, between 400 and 450 visits are completed each year.

As the programme has moved to risk assessed visits only rather than comprehensive visits (as comprehensive visits to all tumour sites have been completed) the number of visits has reduced; in 2013-14 there were 424 cancer visits.

This year, between April 2014 and October 2014, 100 cancer visits and 28 major trauma centre visits have been carried out.