Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:42 pm on 15 June 2016.
Thank you for the third question. There’s been a clear recognition across parties and within the service for some time that to improve cancer outcomes, we need to improve access to diagnostic certainty, but what we’re not doing is actually implementing a different target on diagnostics within the cancer pathway. I’m not persuaded that that will actually help us to get where we want to in terms of focusing on the time it takes to get to first treatment, but also then for outcomes for cancer patients as well. That’s where our focus is going to be.
We’ve already been to—. Officials have already been to Copenhagen to look at the work that they do to understand how they have a different pathway and how that speeds up access to treatment and to outcomes, so there’s nothing new in that sense and it’s part of what we’ve been doing over the last year in any event. Our focus, though, will be on outcomes to understand what we need to do to improve outcomes for patients. Some of the really interesting work that I hope you will see when you see the refreshed cancer delivery plan is actually looking at a single pathway as well, which actually will require a different focus and a change in the way in which we look at and understand our targets. It should mean that we have a more focused and more appropriate look at what will make a difference on the cancer pathway that the clinicians will support and also that the patients will support, which is really delivering improved outcomes that all of us in this Chamber will want to see. Diagnostics are one part of improving that pathway.