Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what immediate term steps his Department is in addition to the Transform Trial to (a) speed up and (b) improve the efficiency of diagnostic pathways in prostate cancer.

The Government is committed to getting the National Health Service diagnosing cancer earlier and treating it faster, so that more patients survive with better outcomes, including for those with prostate cancer. The Department is supporting the NHS in taking steps to speed up and improve the efficiency of diagnostic pathways.

Since October 2023, the NHS has implemented the updated cancer waiting time standards to ensure patients receive timely diagnosis and treatment. The update included the removal the two week wait standard which only ensured patients were seen by a clinician within two weeks, without a timeline of further investigations towards receiving a result. The two-week wait standard was replaced with the faster diagnosis standard (FDS) which ensures a patient receives their cancer diagnosis or has cancer ruled out within 28 days of an urgent referral.

To achieve the FDS, NHS England has streamlined cancer pathways, including implementing a best-timed prostate cancer diagnostic pathway so that those suspected of prostate cancer receive a multi-parametric MRI scan first, which ensures only those men most at-risk undergo an invasive biopsy. Best practice timed pathways support the on-going improvement effort to shorten diagnosis pathways, reduce variation, improve experience of care, and meet the FDS.

Furthermore, the NHS England’s Getting It Right First Time programme published guidance in April 2024 to support the implementation of good practice in management of prostate cancer, which includes ensuring the diagnostic pathways for prostate cancer were implemented from primary care setting to secondary care presentation.