The NHS’s bid to improve cancer services has “lost momentum” over the past two years, according to MPs.
The public accounts committee said that changes in the structure of cancer services had weakened leadership, leaving the UK “in a poor position” compared with the rest of Europe.
It highlighted “unjustifiably poor” survival rates and access to treatment for older people. While three in five cancers are diagnosed in the over-65s, they are less likely to receive certain treatments, and NHS England “did not understand the reasons”, MPs found.
Margaret Hodge, chairwoman of the committee, said: “With more than one in three people developing cancer in their lifetime, cancer touches the lives of all of us at some point, and the Department of Health spends over £6.7 billion on cancer services a year.”
The report called on the health department and NHS England to review arrangements, such as downgrading the position of national clinical director for cancer to a part-time role, and disbanding the National Cancer Action Team. “Leadership has been lost, the support for commissioners and providers to support improvement reduced, and fragmentation of accountability has made progress more difficult,” it said. Health chiefs also failed to capture key information needed to improve cancer services, the report found, or to hold to account organisations in poorly performing areas to account.
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Sarah Woolnough, Cancer Research UK’s executive director of policy, said they hoped the report would catalyse those providing cancer care “to deliver the best for all patients”.
Sean Duffy, the clinical director for cancer at NHS England, said the organisation had already established an independent taskforce “to develop a new cancer strategy for the next five years”.
Yesterday it emerged that nearly 19,000 patients had waited more than six weeks for cancer and heart disease tests in January.
Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said: “David Cameron promised to improve cancer care but this is damning evidence of his failure.”
Separately, a report in Pulse magazine said that the NHS England Wessex area team had written to hospital doctors expressing concern that they might be “bouncing back” patients with symptoms of cancer to GPs for referral, which can increase the length of time it takes for the disease to be diagnosed.