Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he has taken to increase public awareness of symptoms of cancer.

Since early 2011 the Department of Health (Public Health England from 1 April 2013) has been running Be Clear on Cancer campaigns. These are designed to:

- raise the public’s awareness of specific cancer symptoms;

- encourage people with those symptoms to go to the doctor; and

- diagnose cancer at an earlier stage, and therefore make it more treatable, and thereby improve cancer survival rates.

Campaigns that have run nationally include bowel, lung, kidney and bladder (under the common symptom of “blood in pee”), oesophago-gastric, and breast cancer in older women.

Public Health England works closely with the Department and NHS England to ensure that health care professionals are also targeted with campaign information to encourage earlier diagnoses and referrals.