Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on collecting data on secondary breast cancer patients’ (a) diagnosis, (b) treatment and (c) access to support.

As part of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset, the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) is supporting the direct reporting of cancer recurrence data by hospital trusts. Recurrence data collection is also mandated as part of the Cancer Waiting Times Standards.

NCRAS is working closely with cancer charities to improve data collection in this area, looking at how they can help improve completion rates and thus gain a better picture of the burden of recurrence and metastatic disease across the health service. To further support this work NCRAS has been sharing provider-level data on the completeness of recurrence reporting with individual National Health Service trusts since July 2016. The data was last updated in October 2019 and is available on the NCRAS website at the following link:

http://www.ncin.org.uk/cancer_type_and_topic_specific_work/topic_specific_work/recurrence