Mesothelioma: Health Services
(asked on 17th April 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of undertaking a National Mesothelioma Clinical Audit to (a) identify gaps in mesothelioma care, (b) optimise allocation of resources and (c) help tackle regional inequalities in care.
Reducing unwarranted variation in cancer care and treatment is a priority for the Government. In December 2024, my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care committed to developing a National Cancer Plan.
The National Cancer Plan will have patients at its heart and will cover the entirety of the cancer pathway, from referral and diagnosis to treatment and ongoing care, and will apply to all cancer types, including mesothelioma. It will seek to improve every aspect of cancer care, including experiences and outcomes and addressing inequalities in care. Our goal is to reduce the number of lives lost to cancer over the next 10 years.
In October 2022, the NHS Cancer Programme commissioned the Royal College of Surgeons to deliver six new cancer clinical audits on primary breast cancer, metastatic breast cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and kidney cancer. These were in addition to four ongoings clinical audits on lung, bowel, prostate and oesophago-gastric cancer. The new audits, commissioned in 2022, released their first annual State of the Nation report in Autumn 2024, which is available at the following link: