Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made on collecting data for metastatic cancers and how will this be used to inform future workforce planning.

The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) is part of Public Health England and supports the direct reporting of data on all cancers by hospital trusts, as part of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD). All people whose cancer is metastatic at diagnosis are recorded by NCRAS. The overall staging completeness of all cancers recorded by NCRAS exceeds 80%. Those people whose cancer progresses or recurs after treatment have historically not been recorded. However, NCRAS is developing the next version of COSD to support direct recording of these cases wherever possible. Recurrent cancer (which may or may not be metastatic) has been able to be recorded in COSD since 2013 for breast cancer and since 2015 for all cancers. NCRAS is helping trusts improve their reporting by visiting them, providing reporting guidance, and by giving rapid feedback on the number of recurrences they have submitted to NCRAS.

NCRAS is committed to publishing accurate and timely data on all cancers, allowing national and local commissioners to plan requirements for cancer care, including workforce, for the population.