Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to respond to Sarcoma UK’s recent report, Unique Among Cancers: a state of the nation review of sarcoma treatment and services across the UK, and its recommendations for how to improve sarcoma care and treatment.

We have received Sarcoma UK’s report reviewing sarcoma care across the United Kingdom and it is currently being considered. The National Cancer Plan will drive improvements on all fronts, including research, innovation, diagnosis, treatment, and care, in order to improve the experiences and outcomes for patients with rare cancers, including sarcoma patients.

Reducing barriers of entry to care and improving the efficiency of patient pathways are essential to improving cancer outcomes and experiences. The plan will explore how we can improve data collection, sharing, and analysis, to help identify variation and blockages in the pathway and develop solutions with the National Health Service. The Department is working with the National Disease Registration Service and NHS England to address data as a cross-cutting issue for cancer, ensuring that improvements in data collection and integration underpin our efforts to drive clinical quality improvement.

National Disease Registration Service analysts attend quarterly meetings with United Kingdom and Ireland Association of Cancer Registries analysts to discuss any differences in the reporting of cancer data and how these can be made analogous. We will continue the work of the national clinical audits to reduce unwarranted variation.