Debbie Abrahams – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Debbie Abrahams on 2015-11-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether there are differences in the (a) definition and (b) recording of secondary breast cancer in ICD-10 compared with the Cancer Registry.

Jane Ellison

The National Cancer Registration Services (NCRS) code their data using International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 03 in which the data is mapped back to ICD-10 for analysis purposes. ICD-10 does not distinguish between a primary breast tumour or secondary breast tumour. They are coded the same. It is the additional data that the Registry collects across the patient pathway, such as those recurrence data items in the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset that allows NCRS to detect whether a tumour is a primary or a secondary.