Pancreatic Cancer — House of Commons, 2015-01-15
Topic: Health
Jane Ellison (Conservative, Centre-right): I return to the Dispatch Box very rapidly after the debate earlier this afternoon, and on an important topic; one of the most important in my portfolio. I congratulate once again the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) on securing the debate. As ever, he is ably assisted by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw). They and their colleagues in the all-party group have achieved much in this Parliament in highlighting the needs associated with this dreadful disease and in raising awareness of it I have said many times before at the Dispatch Box that improving cancer outcomes is a major priority for the Government and as the annual report on our cancer outcomes strategy in December showed, we are on track to save an extra 12,000 lives by 2015. Sadly too few of them are those suffering from pancreatic cancer, so while we want to see the best possible results for all cancer patients, I appreciate—as we have discussed before—that outcomes are particularly poor for patients with pancreatic cancer. We need to do a lot better I was delighted that on Sunday 11 January NHS England announced a new independent cancer task force to develop a five-year action plan for cancer services that will build on the existing work to improve survival rates and save thousands more lives. The taskforce has been set up to produce a new cross-system, national cancer strategy to take us through the next five years to 2020, building on NHS England’s vision for improving outcomes as set out in the NHS five-year forward view. The taskforce will be set up in partnership with the cancer charities and the health system leaders, and chaired by Dr Harpal Kumar, the chief executive of Cancer Research UK. The all-party group might like to consider how it, too, can participate in, and contribute to, the taskforce The new strategy will set a clear direction covering the following areas: prevention; early and faster diagnosis; better treatment and care for all; recovery, re-ablement and living with and beyond cancer; research and innovation; end-of-life care; data and metrics; and work force. The taskforce will produce a statement of intent by March this year, with the new strategy published in the summer Tackling late diagnosis is, as we have often said, a very important element in achieving our ambition to improve all cancer outcomes. As the hon. Member for Scunthorpe said, however, there is currently no easy way of detecting pancreatic cancer and it can be particularly difficult for GPs to detect and diagnose, especially in its early stages. Symptoms can be complicated by the fact that they are shared with a wide range of benign conditions My ears pricked up when, as part of the taskforce announcement last weekend, NHS England launched a major early diagnosis programme, working with Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support, to test new approaches to identifying cancer more quickly. These include offering patients the option to self-refer for diagnostic tests, as the hon. Gentleman said; lowering the threshold for GP referrals; creating a diagnostic pathway for vague symptoms like tiredness, which is particularly important for hard-to-spot cancers such as pancreatic cancer; and setting up multidisciplinary diagnostic centres so patients can have several tests done on the same day at the same place—not the ping-ponging around, which can be so debilitating for someone already feeling very poorly. NHS England’s aim is to evaluate these innovative initiatives across more than 60 centres around England, collecting evidence on approaches with a view to implementation from 2016-17 Turning to the awareness campaign, we have debated the possibility of pancreatic cancer being part of the "Be Clear on Cancer" campaign set before. Since 2010-11, the Department has undertaken a series of local, regional and national campaigns. Public Health England now leads on this work with the Department, NHS England, charities and relevant stakeholder groups It has always been difficult to give a positive response with regard to pancreatic cancer to date, because the focus has so far been on those cancers with the largest number of avoidable deaths. As colleagues know, these campaigns are under constant review, and we work with the relevant experts to see what more can be done. All the time, there are small trials going on to see where we can tackle other cancers. Pancreatic is obviously one that experts will keep under review The group that makes decisions about the campaigns, the public awareness and primary care steering group, chaired by our national cancer director, Sean Duffy, has considered pancreatic cancer for a possible campaign. To date, it has been unable to recommend it owing to the problems we mentioned about symptoms, but members would be very happy to look at it again if there were new evidence. I sense from all the things going on—particularly some recent announcements—that that point might not be too far in the future.