Ovarian Cancer

(asked on 8th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) improve early diagnosis of ovarian cancer and (b) reduce the level of variation in diagnosis times between clinical commissioning groups.


Answered by
Seema Kennedy Portrait
Seema Kennedy
This question was answered on 17th May 2019

The NHS Cancer Programme is committed to improving early diagnosis as outlined in the Long Term Plan ambition to diagnose three-quarters of all cancers at stages 1 and 2 by 2028. This includes all stageable cancers.

To achieve this ambition, the NHS Cancer Programme is working on a number of programmes to improve early diagnosis rates for all cancers. The Rapid Diagnostic Centres (RDCs) are a new flagship policy in the Long Term Plan that offer patients a range of tests in the same day with rapid access to results. These RDCs starting to be rolled out in 2019/20 and will support the overall early diagnosis ambition. The RDCs will upgrade and bring together the latest diagnostic equipment and expertise, building on 10 models piloted with Cancer Research UK, which have focused on diagnosing cancers where patients often present with non-specific symptoms, often the case with ovarian cancer, and may go to their general practitioner many times before being sent for tests, such as blood and stomach cancers.

A new cancer diagnosis standard, designed to ensure that patients find out within 28 days if they have cancer, will be introduced in 2020. All hospitals in England are now collecting data on how long it takes patients to reach cancer diagnosis, and they are working to improve performance over the next year and reduce unwarranted variation, for example geographical variation.

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