Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the findings of the Nuffield Trust report entitled The NHS at 70: How good is the NHS? that the UK is a below-average performer on preventing deaths from strokes, cancer and heart attacks.

The Nuffield Trust report, ‘The NHS at 70: How good is the NHS?’, as well as highlighting some of the major strengths of the National Health Service - including its efficiency, its management of some long-term conditions like diabetes and kidney diseases and the unusually good financial protection it provides the public from the consequences of ill health – also drew attention to strokes, cancer and heart attacks, as areas where improvements could be made.

The NHS is working to organise acute stroke care to ensure all stroke patients have access to high quality care. Centralising stroke care into a smaller number of larger units ensures specialists are available to manage patients at all times, and provides immediate access to imaging and other investigatory facilities. NHS England is also working with all 24 specialised neuroscience centres in England to continue to roll out and expand the new thrombectomy service.

Cancer is a priority for this Government and survival rates are at a record high, with rates increasing year-on-year since 2010. Around 7,000 people are alive today who would not have been had mortality rates stayed the same as in 2010. We are half way through a five-year programme to transform cancer services and remain on track to deliver on all 96 recommendations of the independent Cancer Taskforce in the Cancer Strategy for England.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention is a key theme in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View and their NHS RightCare programme, and addressing variations in outcomes from CVD is one of Public Health England’s (PHE) top priorities. In September 2017, NHS England and PHE announced a new drive to prevent heart attacks and strokes and save thousands of lives by taking a more integrated approach to cardiovascular care, urging sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs) to take coordinated action to improve prevention, diagnosis and treatment of these life-threatening conditions. The majority of STPs have identified prevention of CVD as a priority.

Additionally, in 2017-18, PHE updated the Heart Age tool, which helps people work out their heart age and risk of heart attack and stroke. Over the course of 2017-18, PHE aimed to engage a further one million adults to use the tool, including targeted measures to increase its use among those aged 30 to 54.