Heidi Alexander – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Heidi Alexander on 2016-03-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 16 March 2016 on Question 30222, what further work in the collection and publication of data on secondary breast cancer by hospital trusts in England is being scoped.

Jane Ellison

Data on breast cancer recurrence has been mandated in the Cancer Services and Outcomes Dataset (COSD) for diagnoses from 1 January 2013. The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) in Public Health England (PHE) estimates about one-quarter of recurrences are currently submitted. NCRAS will support trusts to improve their submission of data by producing reports on the number of recurrences submitted by each National Health Service trust. These will enable the identification of best practise to be shared, and enable us to engage with trusts that are not submitting data.

Data on all cancer recurrence has been mandated in COSD since 31 July 2015.

In addition 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 relapse and recurrence data on all cancers.