Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have been diagnosed with secondary breast cancer in (a) Blaydon constituency and (b) England in each of the last five years.

Hospital trusts submit data for secondary breast cancer diagnoses through the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD) or Cancer Waiting Times (CWT) data collection mechanisms. Data on the reported number of people diagnosed with secondary breast cancers in 2014-2017 in England are available in the following table. Data for 2018 will be published in November 2020.

Notes:

1. Source:

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

2. Where a recurrence record has been reported by multiple trusts it will be included once per trust. This means the totals will include some double-counting of recurrences.
3. Counts from COSD and CWT cannot be combined as there will duplication between the datasets.

The number of reported cases is accepted as being significantly below the estimated number of secondary breast cancers. The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service is working closely with cancer charities to improve data collection and submission by hospital trusts, 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.

Data for secondary breast cancer diagnoses are not available at constituency level. Data on how many people diagnosed with secondary breast cancer who were diagnosed less than and more than five years after a diagnosis of primary breast cancer are not available.