Resources

National cancer breach allocation

National cancer breach allocation guidance provides a clear process on creating local breach allocation policies and incentivises providers to work collaboratively and develop breach policies which will remove bottlenecks from patient pathways and deliver timely cancer treatment. This guidance advises that these policies should adopt a single maximum handover date of day 38, the date by which cancer patients on an inter provider (IPT) pathways should be transferred from the referring trust/s to the treating trust.

Cancer waits

Improving and sustaining cancer performance letters

The How to Guide: Achieving cancer waiting times

This ‘how to’ guidance seeks to provide clinical and managerial leaders with tools to assist in understanding their current cancer waiting times position and provides local teams with a range of materials, including practical tools and methods, evidence-based high-impact changes, case-studies, and signposting for more detailed information resources. Please note that the production of some of this guidance pre-dates the structural changes to the NHS of 2013. Whilst some of the text refers to organisational structures which no longer exist, the tools, methodology and advice on tried and tested solutions remains relevant to support service and performance improvement.

Rapid diagnostic and assessment pathways

These four timed diagnostic pathway handbooks set out how diagnosis within 28 days can be achieved for oesophago-gastric colorectal, lung and prostate cancers.

Early diagnosis, fast diagnosis, and equity of access to treatment and care are central to the National Cancer Programme and the transformation of services the programme wants to achieve by 2020/21.

National cancer breach allocation

National cancer breach allocation guidance provides a clear process on creating local breach allocation policies and incentivises providers to work collaboratively and develop breach policies which will remove bottlenecks from patient pathways and deliver timely cancer treatment. This guidance advises that these policies should adopt a single maximum handover date of day 38, the date by which cancer patients on an inter provider (IPT) pathways should be transferred from the referring trust/s to the treating trust.

Improving and sustaining cancer performance letters

Living with and beyond cancer

Commissioning Person Centred Care for People Affected by Cancer: Guidance

This guidance is intended to support commissioners and strategic clinical networks to ensure every person affected by cancer will have access to the Recovery Package and stratified follow up pathways by 2020, as set out in the cancer strategy. It describes the actions you will need to take to deliver this including checklists for developing service specifications, practical examples and templates to use and adapt locally. The guidance and a legacy document that offers some useful tools for developing stratified pathways are available below:

Living with and beyond bladder cancer: A descriptive summary of responses to a pilot of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) for Bladder Cancer

Living with and beyond bladder cancer: A descriptive summary of responses to a pilot of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) for Bladder Cancer. NHS England and Public Health England have published a report based on a pilot of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) for Bladder Cancer which provides a valuable insight into the health and wellbeing of people living with and beyond bladder cancer.

The survey described in this report was commissioned by the Department of Health and conducted by Picker Institute Europe. This valuable information provided by patients in 2013 was analysed by Public Health England in collaboration with the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) Urological Cancer site-specific clinical reference group. The report identifies and addresses long-term problems and needs experienced by people treated for bladder cancer.

The reports can be found on the NCIN website, or downloaded from this link:

Quality of Life of Colorectal Cancer Survivors in England: Patient Reported Outcome Measures

The publication of this report represents an important milestone in the evaluation of quality of life for people living with and beyond colorectal cancer in England as it is the first national whole population cancer survey using Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs).

Accompanying this report are two excel based tools which should be used alongside this report to provide more detailed information. The National Reporting Tool explores the national findings by respondent characteristics and tumour type and includes information on the free text comments provided. The NHS Trust, CCG and SCN level data toolkit enables the results from each Strategic Clinical Network (SCN), Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and Hospital NHS Trust to be visualised.

Quality of Life for Gynaecological Cancers: Patient Report Outcome Measures (PROMs) Report

NHS England and Public Health England have published reports based on pilots of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) for Gynaecological Cancers. This valuable information provided by patients in 2014 was analysed by the National Cancer Intelligence Network (NCIN) in collaboration with other stakeholder groups including gynaecological cancer charities.  The reports into womb, cervical and ovarian cancers identified and addressed long-term problems and needs experienced by women treated for gynaecological cancers.

The reports can be found on the NCIN website, or downloaded from:

Living With and Beyond Cancer – Baseline Activity

This report sets out baseline activity data from January to March 2017, for Stratified Follow Up and Recovery Package interventions.

Targeted Lung Health Checks

Lung cancer scanning trucks that can operate from supermarket car parks are being rolled out across the country in a drive to save lives by catching the condition early.

Around £70 million will fund 10 projects that check those most at risk, inviting them for an MOT for their lungs and an on the spot chest scan that include mobile clinics.

The targeted screening will help improve survival rates by going first to the some of the areas with the highest death rates from lung cancer.

Streamlining Multi-Disciplinary Team Meetings

This guidance has been developed to enable cancer multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) to respond to the changing landscape in cancer care, as recognised in the NHS Long Term Plan and the Independent Cancer Taskforce Report. It sets out how MDT Meetings (MDTMs) can continue to provide effective clinical management by remaining focussed on discussion of those patient cases which require full multidisciplinary input.