Heidi Alexander – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Heidi Alexander on 2016-03-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to improve his Department’s collection of data for secondary breast cancer.

Jane Ellison

Public Health England (PHE) is responsible for collecting cancer data to support national cancer registration in England and recognises the importance of collecting data on recurrent breast cancer.

At present pilot work in acute trusts has improved the reporting for breast cancer recurrence and metastasis to the National Cancer Registration Service but the uptake has been slow and the data is not complete. Further work is being scoped by NHS England and PHE based on the recommendation in the recent Independent Cancer Taskforce report to establish robust surveillance systems to collect this data on all cancers.

Data on the number of people diagnosed with secondary breast cancer is not currently available.