Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to improve (a) diagnosis and (b) treatment of skin cancer.

The Department will get the National Health Service diagnosing cancer earlier, including skin cancer, and treating it faster so more patients survive. As a first step we have delivered an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week during our first year in Government to ensure earlier diagnoses and faster treatment for those who need it most.

Since 2023/24, NHS England has also been rolling out teledermatology services, which allow a virtual review of dermoscopic images. In providers where this has been fully implemented, improvements in workforce capacity have been seen doubling the number of patients that can be reviewed per clinic in some cases, and improving faster diagnosis standard performance.

NHS England’s Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) national report has provided recommendations to encourage the wider use of technology to ensure skin cancer patients get faster and more equitable access to care. Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) is also planning a programme to support primary care colleagues, offering training for new staff to recognise harmless skin lesions, like moles and warts, with the aim of reducing unnecessary referrals to hospital and freeing up capacity for other patients on the waiting list.

NHS England runs Help Us Help You campaigns in England to increase knowledge of cancer symptoms and address barriers to acting on them, to encourage people to come forward as soon as possible to see their general practitioner. The campaigns focus on a range of symptoms, as well as encouraging body awareness, to help people spot symptoms across a wide range of cancers at an earlier point.

NHS England and other National Health Service organisations, nationally and locally, publish information on the signs and symptoms of many different types of cancer, including skin cancer. This information can be found at sources such as NHS.UK.