Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that cancer early diagnosis targets are appropriate for blood cancers.

The Department remains committed to the early diagnosis of cancer and to improving outcomes for patients. However, we recognise that there is more to be done to ensure that patients with harder to stage cancers, such as blood cancer, receive fast and early diagnoses.

There are no current plans to introduce a specific proxy staging measure or a corresponding national target to support the earlier diagnosis of blood cancers. However, to tackle late, emergency setting diagnoses of blood cancers, the National Health Service is implementing non-specific symptom (NSS) pathways for patients who present with symptoms such as weight loss and fatigue, which do not clearly align to a tumour type. There are currently 115 NSS services operating in England, with blood cancers being one of the most common cancer types diagnosed through these pathways.