Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure timely access to chemosaturation for patients with metastatic ocular (uveal) melanoma.

The Department remains committed to ensuring that cancer patients, including those with metastatic ocular melanoma, have timely access to treatment and tailored medical support.

In 2016, NHS England concluded that there was insufficient evidence to make chemosaturation treatment available to patients on the National Health Service. NHS England is currently in the early stages of policy development for chemosaturation to treat metastatic uveal melanoma where surgery to remove or destroy affected cells and tissue in the liver is not feasible.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has published an Interventional Procedure Guidance for this treatment, and while this does allow NHS trusts to offer the treatment locally, they can only do so if they put in place special arrangements for clinical governance, consent, audit, or research, because further evidence of benefit and safety is needed. The 2016 NHS England Clinical Commissioning policy is currently under review, and we expect that a new draft policy will be shared with stakeholders over the coming months. If NHS England’s clinical panel makes the treatment routinely available across the NHS in England it will require further consideration through relative prioritisation and investment before full roll out.

The development of a Clinical Commissioning policy will determine both if the evidence is now sufficient to enable making the treatment routinely available and, if it is, whether to allocate service development funding to implement it across the NHS in England.