Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking, together with the NHS, to improve information sharing between healthcare services to support higher quality and patient-centred cancer care.

My Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care has announced the intention for there to be a single patient record, so professionals have the data they need when treating patients and are able to make better informed decisions and deliver more preventative health and care. We are in the early stages of engaging with the public and stakeholders to understand their views about the use of health and care data. We will use the findings to form the basis of our future plans.

Furthermore, NHS England is investing £1.9 billion to support hospital trusts to either adopt a new or improve their existing systems, to ensure every hospital in England can benefit from digital transformation, to achieve the vision of a digitised National Health Service by March 2026.

The aim of the Frontline Digitisation programme is for all secondary care trusts to have an electronic patient record system (EPR) that meets our standards. The programme is forecasting to achieve 97% EPR coverage by the programme end in March 2026, with the remaining 3% of trusts having advanced in their plans for an EPR.