Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to ensure that the NHS improves the diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Achieving earlier diagnosis of cancer is key to our ambition to save an additional 5,000 lives per year by 2014-15. We are investing £450 million to achieve early diagnosis of cancer through better public awareness, better screening and better access to key diagnostic tests. However we know that early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer can be very difficult as the symptoms are shared with a wide range of benign conditions.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer (2005) are available to help general practitioners assess when it is appropriate to refer patients for suspected cancer, including pancreatic cancer. NICE is in the process of updating the guidelines to ensure that these reflect latest evidence and can continue to support general practitioners (GPs) to identify patients with suspected cancer symptoms and urgently refer them as appropriate. NICE’s anticipated publication date for the revised guidelines is May 2015.

We understand that NHS England has asked NICE to develop a clinical guideline and quality standard on pancreatic cancer.

At a local level, it is for individual clinical commissioning groups to promote and enhance the diagnostic capability to deliver better outcomes. Surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy treatments that may be used for pancreatic cancer are commissioned at the moment by NHS England. NHS England’s pancreatic cancer service specification clearly defines what it expects to be in place for providers to offer evidence-based, safe and effective pancreatic cancer services. This service specification has been developed by specialised clinicians, commissioners, expert patients and public health representatives to describe core and developmental service standards.

NHS England has also committed to make up to £6 million available over the next three years to support six trials by Cancer Research UK into the use of Stereotactic Ablative Radiotherapy (SABR), an innovative radiotherapy treatment. This will allow patients to receive SABR treatment now, where clinicians think they could benefit. At the same time doctors can fully assess the effectiveness of these treatments so that in future, if it proves to be effective, they will be available for all relevant patients on the NHS. One of these six trials will be on pancreatic cancer.

The Department published Improving Outcomes for Upper Gastro-Intestinal Cancers in 2001, which describes best practice in the delivery of services for patients with all types of upper gastro-intestinal cancer, including pancreatic cancer.

NICE has recommended gemcitabine as a treatment option for pancreatic cancer in technology appraisal guidance published in May 2001, subject to certain clinical criteria and is currently appraising a number of other pancreatic cancer drugs. Patients have the right to drugs and treatments that have been recommended by NICE technology appraisal guidance for use in the National Health Service, where their doctor believes they are clinically appropriate.

A number of drugs to treat pancreatic cancers are also available through the Cancer Drugs Fund.