John Baron MP leads Parliamentary cancer debate

MP says underperforming CCGs must be held accountable

Yesterday in the House of Commons, John Baron MP led a Parliamentary debate on improving cancer outcomes. John is the Chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cancer (APPGC) and, together with the chairmen and chairwomen of other cancer-related All-Party Parliamentary Groups, applied to the Back Bench Business Committee for the debate. The Minister with responsibility for cancer, Jane Ellison MP, answered for the Government.

In the debate, John said,

“NHS’ England’s decision in December to listen to the concerns of the cancer community and include one-year cancer survival statistics, broken down by Clinical Commissioning Group, into the Delivery Dashboard of the Assurance Framework could be transformational. For the first time, the local NHS will be held properly accountable for its one-year cancer survival rates.”

“An obvious way of increasing one-year survival rates is to improve performance at earlier diagnosis – as late diagnosis makes for poor survival. The recent NHS reforms give CCGs the power to design initiatives tailored to their populations – for cancer, these could include better screening programmes, expanded awareness programmes and improved access to diagnostics at Primary Care.”

“By putting one-year cancer survival at the top of the NHS’ ‘accountability tree’, pressure will be brought upon underperforming CCGs to raise their game. It will be incumbent on everyone to ensure this – NHS England, Government, Parliamentarians and the public alike. If we get this right we could quite literally save thousands of lives.”