5. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on cancer services in Wales? OAQ52027

The cancer delivery plan outlines our vision for cancer services in Wales. It brings stakeholders together to drive improvement in cancer services and outcomes. The plan was updated and re-published in November 2017 and will take us through to 2020.

Earlier this month, my constituent Mr Huw Thomas of Bargoed brought to my attention a new initiative for cancer treatment that is being introduced by NHS England, which is the creation of one-stop shops for cancer diagnosis with all of the necessary tests to diagnose the disease being carried out in one centre. The aim is to speed up the identification of particular types of cancer. I understand that there are two such pilots in Wales—I may be wrong about that, but that's what I was told last week. I'm aware of the Welsh Government's strategic document you made reference to, but it doesn't specifically mention that. So, can the Cabinet Secretary clarify that and give us his thoughts on whether such an initiative would be of benefit in Wales?

Yes, and I'm grateful to the Member for raising the issue. It highlights, in some ways, how an announcement made in England will often grab attention and headlines, whereas work we are already doing in advance of England often doesn't reach the same pick-up. In this area, we've actually been looking at what we're calling a vague symptom pathway, which is essentially a one-stop shop, and those pathways are being piloted in both Cwm Taf health board and the Aneurin Bevan health board. It's a two-year pilot. We've already undertaken about a year of that. After a second year, we'll have an evaluation to understand the impact of it. This is part of the cancer implementation group's work for that focus on earlier identification. It comes from work done by Welsh clinicians when they visited Denmark to understand what they had done more successfully on the early identification of cancer. So, it's an area where we're actually ahead of the pilot they're undertaking in England, and I expect to have results earlier than that. Then, of course, I'll be more than happy to report back to this place and the wider public about what we continue to do to improve cancer outcomes here in Wales.     

Cabinet Secretary, April is Bowel Cancer Awareness Month. According to a report by Bowel Cancer UK, patients at five out of seven health boards in Wales are waiting too long for tests to diagnose bowel cancer, and less than half of people eligible for screening tests have had them. Given that bowel cancer survival rates in Wales are among the worst in Europe, what action will the Welsh Government take to address the lack of capacity in our hospitals to meet existing demand and increase awareness of the need for screening tests among at-risk groups in Wales? Thank you. 

The points on staff capacity we've discussed in answer to a previous question on work that is already under way, about the fact that our diagnostic capacity is showing an increase, an that there's an improvement in waiting times for people here in Wales. We've also discussed what we're doing to improve outcomes in answer to the question raised by your colleague David Melding. I'm looking to improve bowel testing and screening uptake. And actually, the biggest challenge there is getting the public to undertake the screening test themselves. That's why we're going to introduce a more effective and more sensitive test in January next year.

So, we are already taking steps and, actually, when you look at our rates compared to the rest of the UK, we actually compare pretty well in terms of cancer outcomes. In terms of cancer waits, we could talk at length about the fact that we generally have a better performance on cancer waits in Wales than in England and, actually, our direct survival rates are directly comparable with England. When they have a more advantaged and wealthier population as a whole, you would actually expect their outcomes to be better. 

But the real challenge for us is not just to say that we compare well with England and the rest of the UK; the real challenge for us here in Wales is that every nation in the UK is at the wrong end of the survival table across Europe. Our ambition is not to continue to maintain a gap positively with England, but to do much better so that more people survive cancer after one year and five years, and when we're looking at our comparators in Europe, we can be much happier about where we are, and then again reset our sights on the next stage of improvement.