Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many referrals the NHS made to each of the two American and one Swiss centres from which it commissions proton beam therapy in each of the last five years for which figures are available; what the cost of purchasing that treatment from each such centre in each such year was; and what the cost to the NHS was of (a) travel, (b) accommodation and (c) other expenses relating to treatment provided at each such centre in each such year.

Patients are referred to these centres each year through one of the most developed commissioning programmes for proton beam therapy (PBT) abroad in the world. NHS England monitors these services carefully and is confident that they offer a high quality holistic service. This is particularly important because the treatment takes about 10 weeks.

NHS England is not able to provide information broken down by the number of patients per site, per year, as this is not held in the format requested. Additionally, due to the small number of patients involved (in particular for the centre in Switzerland), there would be a risk of providing patient identifiable information.

Patients sent abroad for PBT over the last five years is as follows:

The costs of treatment and accommodation are incurred as part of the package of treatment, and are currently approximately £75,000 per patient.

In April 2012, the Secretary of State announced that £250 million will be invested to build PBT facilities at The Christie Hospital in Manchester and University College London Hospitals. Work has already started and the first facility is due to become operational in 2018.