Changes to Cancer Waiting Times standards and Official Statistics

Following a consultation on the cancer waiting times standards, NHS England have had approval from government to implement changes to the standards from 1 October 2023.

The response to the consultation is published here NHS England » Cancer waiting times review – Models of care and measurement: consultation response

The statistics on cancer waiting times will be updated to ensure that they follow the changed operating framework for cancer, and address responses to the consultation on disaggregation of the standards.  These changes will begin from the publication of October 2023 data planned to be published in December 2023.  The updates are as follows:

• • Outputs to give prominence to the headline statistics for the new waiting times standards.
  • Maintain the statistics published on the 28 day Faster Diagnosis Standard.
  • Include breakdowns of the new 31 and 62 day standards by variables which allow derivation of the old 31 and 62 day standards.  That is, for the 31 day standard include breakdowns by treatment stage (first or subsequent) and modality (Anti-cancer drug regimen, Radiotherapy, Surgery, Other), and for the 62 day standard by source of referral (Urgent suspected cancer, Breast Symptomatic, Screening and Consultant Upgrade).
  • Remove the breakdown by admitted and non admitted care from treatment standards.
  • For the 31 and 62 day standards, provide a more granular tumour type breakdown for a range of cancers by sub dividing the categories currently published.  Historic data for the new categories will not be available.  The new classification will be such that the old classification for the current 31 first and 62 day urgent suspected cancer will be able to be derived from aggregation of the new categories to create a consistent time series.  That is, adopt the following new categories: Lung, Breast, Skin, Lower GI, Prostate, Other Urological, Lymphoma, Other haematological, OG, Hepatobiliary, Head and Neck, Gynaecological and ‘All Other’ cancers.
  • 31-day referral to treatment performance for acute leukaemia, children’s and testicular cancers will no longer be published separately, as no performance standard has been applied to this report for some time and reported numbers are extremely small. Data for these cancers will continue to be included within the wider 62-day referral to treatment data.
  • Continue to publish total numbers seen following an urgent suspected cancer referral and urgent referral where breast symptoms are exhibited but cancer is not initially suspected. Maintain the time waited bands as currently published for these measures, but cease publication of the % seen within 14 days which was the two week wait performance measure which is being removed from the operating framework.
  • Publish further management information on the backlog.

NHS England will initially adopt an official statistics badge for all the updated statistical outputs, pending assessment by the Office for Statistics Regulation.

Feedback can be sent through to england.cancerwaitsdata@nhs.net