Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to make an assessment of the potential merits of (a) introducing a proxy staging measure for non-stageable blood cancers and (b) applying a national target to (i) measure and (ii) support a reduction in levels of late diagnosis.

There are no current plans to introduce a specific proxy staging measure or a corresponding national target to support the earlier diagnosis of blood cancers.

It is a priority for the Government to support the National Health Service to diagnose cancer, including blood cancer, as early and quickly as possible, and to treat it faster, to improve outcomes. We will get the NHS diagnosing blood cancer earlier and treating it faster. We will start by delivering an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week, as the first step to ensuring early diagnosis and faster treatment.

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 blood cancer, which the national evaluation found was one of the most common cancers diagnosed via these pathways.

The National Cancer Plan will include further details on how we will improve outcomes for cancer patients, including those with blood cancer and other cancers with lower survival rates. We are now in discussions about what form that plan should take, and what its relationship to the 10-Year Health Plan and the Government’s wider Health Mission should be and will provide updates in due course.