Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy Dataset in the collection of health outcome data from patients receiving cancer medicines paid for by the Cancer Drugs Fund.

In July 2015, NHS England and Public Health England (PHE) signed a data sharing agreement concerning the Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF) use, enabling NHS England to provide to PHE details of patients for whom a CDF treatment had been requested by clinicians. This will enable PHE to link information on patients for whom a CDF treatment was requested (from 1 April 2013 onwards) with a range of other data sets.

There is presently no agreement between NHS England and PHE in terms of providing outcome information on patients receiving CDF funded treatments, or other systemic anti-cancer therapies, on a regular basis. However, PHE and NHS England are currently having detailed and productive discussions to establish a dedicated core resource which will provide NHS England with routine and bespoke information and analysis, focusing on both routine chemotherapy and activity data and outcome and quality metrics, which can include outcome analyses on the CDF.

The Accelerated Access Review is looking at ways to better use data on treatments and outcomes from initiatives, such as the CDF, to drive innovation, adoption and reimbursement of novel treatments.