England's cancer outcomes worse than rest of Europe: National Audit Office report

The UK’s National Audit Office has published a report, Progress in improving cancer services and outcomes in England, which confirms that English cancer patients’ health outcomes and survival rates are poorer than their European counterparts due to access to life-saving medicines.

The report showed that 31% of those diagnosed with cancer in 2012 died within a year. Data on five-year survival rates published in 2013 (for those diagnosed between 2000 and 2007) showed that, although survival rates in England have improved, they remained about 10% lower than the European average. Outcomes are particularly poor in relative terms for older patients. The report underlined that these poorer outcomes were likely to be due to access to treatment, quality of care and timing of diagnosis.

Stephen Whitehead, chief executive of the ABPI, said: “Now is the time to find a long-term, sustainable solution for evaluating the cost-effectiveness and efficacy of all medicines and we believe that the only solution remains the urgent reform of NICE. We welcome all opportunities to work with NHS and the Department of Health, including through the recently-formed taskforce for cancer services and the Innovative Medicines and MedTech Review, in order support transformation of the health care system so that it enables all patients to access the right medicines at the right time, whatever their condition.”