Cancer: Blackpool North and Cleveleys

(asked on 3rd March 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps his Department has taken to reduce waiting times for NHS hospital appointments for cancer patients in Blackpool North and Cleveleys constituency.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 11th March 2020

In December 2019 (latest data) performance at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust against the two week wait from general practitioner (GP) referral to seeing a cancer specialist standard was 94.6%, better than the 93.0% performance standard. Performance against the 31 day wait from diagnosis to first treatment for cancer was also better than the performance standard (96%), at 99.3%.

However, performance against the 62 day wait standard for GP referral to a first treatment for cancer (85% standard) was not met and therefore a detailed full cancer pathway performance recovery plan has been developed. This forms part of Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s wider single improvement plan and is supported by the Trust Cancer Board to improve cancer waiting times. Specific actions being progressed include:

- Redesigning the prostrate pathway to enable faster diagnosis, by introducing a one stop clinic and MRI scanning;

- A system wide risk summit for Bowel Screening took place in November 2019 and actions to improve continue to be progressed;

- Robustly managing the patient tracking list for all cancer cases; and

- Review of multi-disciplinary team clinics are taking place to increase patient flow efficiency.

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