Cancer Services

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:11 pm on 25 April 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:11, 25 April 2018

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.