Cancer Services

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:09 pm on 25 April 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:09, 25 April 2018

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.