Thank you for contacting me about cancer care. We continue to take steps to reduce cancer diagnosis and treatment waiting times across England, including the time between an urgent general practice referral and the commencement of treatment for cancer for patients.
We have been working jointly with NHS England on implementing the delivery plan for tackling the Covid-19 backlogs in elective care and plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022-23 to 2024-25 to help drive up and protect elective activity, including cancer diagnosis and treatment activity.
Additionally, NHS England is providing over£266 million in cancer service development funding to Cancer Alliances, to support delivery of the operational priorities for cancer. To help achieve the cancer waiting times standards, NHS England is streamlining cancer pathways. This includes implementing non-symptom specific pathways for patients who present with non-specific symptoms, as well as timed cancer pathways focused on the most challenged pathways, such as lower gastrointestinal and skin cancer. The pathways aims to support improvements in operational performance and patient experience, as well as providing models to support sustainable improvement. Furthermore, we know that speed of diagnosis is critical to a patient’s outcome, so we are rolling-out additional diagnostic capacity located in the community.
We are currently delivering the second year of the three-year investment plan for establishing community diagnostic centres (CDCs). We are ensuring timely implementation of new CDC locations and upgrades to existing CDCs, with capacity prioritised for cancer diagnostics. As of April 2024, 160 CDCs are operational, and have delivered almost 8 million tests, checks, and scans since July 2021.
We will go further with a manifesto commitment to open an additional 50 CDCs so people can get the care they need closer to home. Additionally, we are supporting advances in radiotherapy. Since 2016, we’ve invested £162 million into cutting-edge radiotherapy equipment to replace or upgrade over 100 radiotherapy treatment machines. We are committed to delivering the best possible outcomes for patients, and our approach is seeing success.
Almost 344,000 people received their first cancer treatment in the 12 months to March 2024. 2023-24 is the best year so far for the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), with the latest performance data showing that NHS England hit the FDS target for the second month in a row at 77.3 per cent, above the standard of 75 per cent. We have also reduced the 62 day or over cancer referral to treatment backlog, to pre-pandemic levels.