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 improve early diagnosis of sarcoma in children and young people.

NHS England and NHS Improvement, through their Children’s and Young People’s Cancer Clinical Reference Group, is establishing Operational Delivery Networks (ODNs) to enable clinicians to lead and improve cancer pathways for children and young people with cancer, ensuring timely referral and diagnosis.

The recent publication of the 2020 Patient Survey report by the Bone Cancer Research Trust will assist ODNs with this task and the commencement of a clinical trial is supported by NHS England and NHS Improvement, as recommended, to establish the reasons behind and the consequences of delayed diagnosis.