Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to reduce the number of prostate cancer deaths.

Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to improving survival rates for cancer, including prostate cancer, and thereby reducing the number of cancer deaths. The Department is taking steps to reduce cancer diagnosis and treatment waiting times and is working jointly with NHS England on implementing the delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlogs in elective care. This includes plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to help drive up and protect elective activity, including cancer diagnosis and treatment.  

To support early diagnosis, NHS England introduced the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) which sets a maximum target of 28 days from urgent suspected general practice or screening referral to patients being told that they have cancer, or that cancer is ruled out. To achieve this target, NHS England have streamlined cancer pathways, including implementing a best-timed prostate cancer diagnostic pathway so that those suspected of prostate cancer receive a multi-parametric, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan first, which ensures only those men most at-risk undergo an invasive biopsy. Best practice timed pathways support the on-going improvement effort to shorten diagnosis pathways, reduce variation, improve experience of care, and meet the FDS. For patients, the prostate best-practice timed pathway may reduce anxiety and uncertainty of a possible cancer diagnosis, with reduced time between referral and receiving the outcome of diagnostic test

In November 2023 we announced a £42 million screening trial with Prostate Cancer UK, to find ways of detecting the country’s most common male cancer earlier. The first-of-its-kind trial, called TRANSFORM, will use innovative screening methods like MRI scans to detect prostate cancer, and will see hundreds of thousands of men across the country participating

On 24 January 2023, the Government announced that it will publish a Major Conditions Strategy to consider the six conditions, including cancer, that contribute most to morbidity and mortality across the population in England. We published the Major Conditions Strategy: Case for Change and Our Strategic Framework on 14 August 2023, which sets out our approach to making the change over the next five years that will deliver the most value in facing the health challenges of today, and of the decades ahead.