New cancer ratings published
NHS England has today published new ratings providing a snapshot of how well different areas of the country are diagnosing and treating cancer and supporting patients.
Based on data published over the course of the last two years, the Clinical Commissioning Group Improvement and Assessment Framework provides an initial baseline rating for six clinical priority areas, including cancer.
The ratings, which are broken down by local Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and published on MyNHS, show areas in need of improvement, but also highlight areas of best practice.
The overall rating for cancer is based on four indicators or metrics; early diagnosis, one year survival, 62 day waits after referral, and overall patient experience.
Cancer Alliances will play a key role in bringing together local leaders, including from CCGs, to drive improvement in cancer outcomes, including reducing variation and promoting the sharing of best practice.
In response to the publication of these data, an NHS England spokesperson said: “NHS cancer patients’ care is now the best it’s ever been, but we’ve set stretching goals to save thousands more lives by 2020. Measured against this ambition it’s not surprising that most local services need to make further improvements, but we’re going to track progress transparently so everyone can see how we are improving care and outcomes for patients.
“Over the past four years adult smoking rates are down by nearly 1 million people demonstrating the benefits of a comprehensive public health policy. This will be the single biggest contributor to reduced cancer deaths.
“On top of current funding, this year we are also investing an extra £15m in improving early diagnosis and setting up Cancer Alliances to bring together leadership across local areas to drive improvements.”
6 comments
The indicator scores have been published, however the domain scores for Maternity and Mental Health have not been.
The Mental Health domain score can be calculated by using the methodology document on your website; the maternity score cannot be as it requires the national average and confidence limit figures / thresholds.
My NHS do not publish these thresholds and, when asked if they could include this in the downloads along with other key metadata (such as time period that the data covers, when it was last updated, and link to methodologies etc.). Including these data in the publication would allow site users to know how recent data were, if scores or individual indicators had been updated, or see how well each CCG scores over time or against other areas, such as those within the STP or CCGs that are considered as similar. Some of the indicator definitions (with the time periods covered) are linked from the website but a number are not, and this seems to be a bit random.
When discussed with MyNHS colleagues, they seemed to struggle with the concept of including metadata; and that this would improve the transparency that seems to be the main intention of the site, but that it fails to provide.
I work with Teenagers and young adults and would be interesting to know what improvements we are seeing now we are recruiting more YP into trials.
Hi
Survival data for children and young adults is available through the national cancer dashboard: https://www.cancerdata.nhs.uk/dashboard/. Unfortunately due to the small numbers in each CCG, it is only possible to reliably estimate survival at the national level.
Regards
NHS England
Initially, link to MyNHS doesn’t work: receive message ‘Server not Found’ Then it tries to link to 1173 but after 10 minutes no page comes up; tried twice. No problem with other websites.
Hi Peter
Sorry you are experiencing problems accessing the MyNHS link. We have made some investigations and that area of the MyNHS site is currently unavailable. They hope it will be back up and running within the next day or so.
Regards
NHS England
What good will Cancer Alliances be if it is only Professionals on them . Patient Experience input is urgently needed on these bodies and should be there in place and not just Cancer Charities . Actual happened to patients with experience of cancelled operations and radiotherapy machines breaking down in the middle of a treatment . to tell how it is not how professionals think it should be .