Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether there are differences in the (a) definition and (b) recording of secondary breast cancer in ICD-10 compared with the Cancer Registry.
The National Cancer Registration Services (NCRS) code their data using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 03 in which the data is mapped back to ICD-10 for analysis purposes. ICD-10 does not distinguish between a primary breast tumour or secondary breast tumour. They are coded the same. It is the additional data that the Registry collects across the patient pathway, such as those recurrence data items in the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset that allows NCRS to detect whether a tumour is a primary or a secondary.