Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to raise public awareness of the signs and symptoms of brain tumours.

NHS England is delivering a range of interventions to support general practitioners (GPs) in diagnosing brain cancer earlier, therefore the Department is not running any additional public awareness campaigns at this stage.

In April 2020, NHS England introduced the “early cancer diagnosis service specification” for Primary Care Networks. This is designed to support improvements in rates of early cancer diagnosis by requiring Primary Care Networks to review the quality of their practices’ referrals for suspected cancer and take steps to improve this.

NHS England is also working with Cancer Alliances and GPs to diagnose more cancers earlier by making funding available to embed clinical decision support tools within general practice and give them access to a wider range of diagnostic tests. This includes brain MRIs, for patients with concerning symptoms, but who fall outside the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guideline threshold for an urgent suspected cancer referral. These tools and tests are expected to support the earlier detection of a range of cancers including brain cancer.