Yasmin Qureshi – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Yasmin Qureshi on 2014-04-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that future iterations of the Cancer Patient Experience Survey enable the responses of patients with primary and secondary cancer to be analysed separately.

Jane Ellison

No recent Ministerial discussions have taken place on the potential for Patient Reported Outcome Measures to be used to measure improvements in outcomes for breast cancer patients.

NHS England took over responsibility for the Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES) on 1 April 2013. The development of the CPES is overseen by the Cancer Patient Experience Advisory Group (CPEAG), which has a wide ranging membership including clinicians, cancer charities, experts in survey methodologies, research bodies, health service commissioners and NHS England staff.

The survey questionnaire is reviewed by CPEAG each year to ensure that it captures the best information and as part of the process for the next survey, NHS England is engaging with a range of stakeholders to look at how it can improve and amend the survey appropriately.

In the meantime, NHS England has added a new question to the 2014 survey questionnaire to identify patients who have been diagnosed with cancer more than once because the evidence suggests that there may be a difference in the experience of those patients.

The results of the 2014 survey will be published later this year.