Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of NHS trusts that submit the mandatory required data on secondary breast cancer.

The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) is part of Public Health England. NCRAS is supporting the direct reporting of recurrence data by all hospital trusts, as part of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD). Since 2013 there has been the ability to report breast cancer recurrences including secondary breast cancer in COSD, but these data are not yet being fully collected and submitted by all trusts. Recurrence data collection is also mandated as part of the Cancer Waiting Times (CWT) Standards.

NCRAS is helping trusts improve their reporting by visiting, providing reporting guidance, and by giving rapid feedback on the number of recurrences they have submitted to NCRAS. To further support this work NCRAS shared provider-level data on the completeness of recurrence reporting with individual NHS trusts. There was no deadline for publication of this data, however the data was sent to all interested stakeholders in July 2016.

Of the 148 trusts that could be expected to be collecting data on breast cancer recurrence, all 148 submitted data for 2014 diagnoses through the COSD or CWT data collection mechanisms. The sharing of data with trusts has highlighted that the completeness of the data is variable and significantly below the estimated number of secondary breast cancers.

NCRAS is working closely with cancer charities to improve data collection in this area, looking at how they can help improve completion rates and thus gain a better picture of the burden of recurrence and metastatic disease across the health service.