Cancer deaths in England down
pharmafile | December 3, 2008 | News story | Sales and Marketing |Â Â NHSÂ
Cancer death rates in England have dropped and one-year survival rates are up, according to the Department of Health.
But a year on from the launch of the government's Cancer Reform Strategy (CRS), national cancer director Professor Mike Richards admitted: "Of course we would all like to have seen more and faster progress on implementation of the CRS."
The CRS aims to improve the quality of cancer services to 2012 and Richards wants a greater range of more expensive drugs made available to more NHS patients.
Other priorities for the coming year include tackling delays in diagnosis and improving the quality and safety of chemotherapy services, he added.
Cancer groups are broadly supportive of the strategy. But Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, warned: "Implementation of the CRS locally by the NHS will ultimately determine its success for patients.
"We remain confident that the strategy will be fully implemented by 2012 as long as it is given higher priority by the government and NHS locally."
Maintaining Momentum, Building for the Future is the first CRS progress report. It shows three-year average mortality rates for cancer in under-75s for England have fallen by 18% since 1995-97.
Nearly 9,000 lives will have been saved in that age group last year compared with the 1996 baseline, the report suggests.
The government believes it is also on course to meet its target of a reduction of at least 20% in cancer death rates in people under 75 by 2010.
However, the incidence of cancer continues to rise due to the ageing population and is predicted to increase by around a third between 2001 and 2020.
The most recent figures show that there were 242,200 new cases of malignant cancer (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) in England in 2006.
This compares to 239,000 in 2005 and 223,500 in 2000.
New cases are split almost equally between men and women, with the four most common cancers – breast, lung, colorectal and prostate – accounting for over half.
Breast cancer was responsible for one in three newly-diagnosed cases in women and prostate cancer for one in four among men.
Late diagnosis is a major factor in poor cancer survival rates, something the government's National Awareness and Early Detection Initiative is designed to address.
Health minister Ann Keen said: "We are committed to providing cancer patients with the best possible services to taking action to prevent cancer in the first place and to detecting it at the earliest possible point."
Other initiatives so far have included the introduction of the HPV vaccine for girls and young women to protect against 70% of cervical cancer cases. The roll-out of cancer screening two years ago has so far led to 2,000 cancers being detected.
A National Cancer Survivorship Initiative, which aims to ensure that England's 1.6 million cancer survivors receive integrated, quality services, has also been launched.
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