Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that bowel cancer patients get high quality care.

As recommended by the UK National Screening Committee and the independent Cancer Taskforce, NHS England is introducing a new easier to use home testing kit for bowel cancer screening. FIT (Faecal Immunochemical Test for haemoglobin) will replace Faecal Occult Blood testing (FOBt) as the primary screening method from autumn 2018.

In April 2018, NHS England published a handbook on how to implement timed bowel cancer diagnostic pathways. Timed pathways are a driver for faster diagnosis of cancer, ensuring that patients are given a diagnosis of cancer or the all clear within 28 days of presenting to their general practitioner with symptoms. Implementation of the timed pathway in full across England by March 2019 is identified as a key deliverable for all services in the NHS Planning Guidance 2018/19.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published diagnostics guidance on the role of testing for Lynch syndrome in people with colorectal cancer in February 2017. NHS England will be working with clinical commissioning group pathology service commissioners to determine whether they can jointly develop a policy proposition relating to genetic testing and the NICE guidance on testing for Lynch syndrome. NHS England will be considering this issue as part of the relevant work programmes during 2018/19.