Richard Burden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Richard Burden on 2016-07-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what discussions he and his officials have had with Public Health England about the collection of data on secondary breast cancer in (a) the West Midlands and (b) England.

David Mowat

Ministers, officials, Public Health England (PHE) and breast cancer charities are in ongoing discussions about secondary breast cancer data.

The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), which is part of PHE, is supporting the direct reporting of recurrence data by all hospital trusts, as part of the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD). Since 2013 there has been the ability to report breast cancer recurrences in COSD, and in 2015 this was expanded to include all cancer recurrences, but these data are not yet being fully collected and submitted by all trusts.

NCRAS is helping trusts improve their reporting by visiting, providing reporting guidance, and by giving rapid feedback on the number of recurrences they have submitted to NCRAS. To further support this work NCRAS is currently preparing to share new provider-level data for the whole of England on the data completeness of recurrence reporting within trusts.