Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress has been made in the building of 60 new multi-disciplinary centres for cancer diagnosis, announced by NHS England in January 2015.

NHS England’s Accelerate, Co-ordinate, Evaluate (ACE) programme is testing innovative ways of diagnosing cancer earlier. Wave 1 of this programme incorporated 60 projects looking at a number of different initiatives, including offering patients the option to self-refer for diagnostic tests; lowering referral thresholds for general practitioners; and multi-disciplinary diagnostic centres where patients can have several tests in the same place on the same day.

The ACE programme is currently testing and evaluating these new approaches.

The results of the evaluation of wave 1 of the ACE programme are expected to be available shortly, and will inform the work of the national cancer programme to implement the recommendations of the independent Cancer Taskforce.