Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, which data sources he intends to capture through (a) the National Cancer Registration Service and (b) care.data.

The National Cancer Registration Service uses a wide range of data sources on patients with cancer that are already collected by the National Health Service for other purposes including: Patient Administration System (PAS) data, Histopathology and laboratory Reports, Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy data, cancer waiting times and cancer screening data from NHS England, cancer audit data from the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) and vital status data from the Office for National Statistics.

The Pathfinder stage of the care.data programme will test and refine processes ahead of extracting data from NHS general practitioner (GP) practices in England. The Pathfinder stage will be limited to participating GP surgeries in the clinical commissioning group areas of Leeds North, Leeds West and South and Leeds East, Somerset, West Hampshire and Blackburn with Darwen. When the Care.Data programme is rolled out nationally GP data will be linked to Hospital Episode Statistics which is already collected by the HSCIC. In the future, the NHS also plans to start collecting information from other parts of the health and social care system, such as ambulance data and from community health services such as district nursing.