To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce the breast cancer care backlog in London.
This answer is the replacement for a previous holding answer.
Answered on
12 April 2022
In London, the national ‘Help us to Help You’ campaigns have been promoted and included local initiatives, which has increased number of referrals. Mutual aid is being provided between providers in London, initially within local clinical commissioning group area and with other London providers where this is not available. This allows faster access to first outpatient appointments with clinical assessment where waiting times are shorter.
Due to the nature of treatments for breast cancer where surgery is often a day case, this pathway has continued more consistently. Those on breast cancer pathways waiting longer than 62 days currently represent approximately 10% of all pathways and continues to decrease.
Levels of first treatments remain high, with 130 more breast cancers treated through the urgent general practitioner route compared to pre-pandemic levels and we anticipate that some patients will have been referred via screening.