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Hospital care
Timeliness of access to cancer treatment – improving care
Background
The time it takes for people to get the treatment they need after receiving a diagnosis of cancer varies widely across the NHS in England. Some people wait a long time, even though NHS England has set a benchmark for 96% of people to begin their treatment within 31 days of a decision to treat.
NHS England data for October 2023 to March 2024 suggests that while the target is generally met for chemotherapy (98.7%), the proportion is much lower for curative surgery (83.2%) and radiotherapy (89.0%), even though they are the two main curative methods used to care for solid tumours.
Delays in getting treatment can make the outcomes for people with cancer worse and can widen health inequalities. But the reasons for delays in treatment need to be better understood so the right solutions can be designed and implemented. Some delays might be because of how the healthcare system works, how care pathways are currently organised, and the different patients interact with services. A more coordinated and evidence-based approach is needed to identify, co-design and evaluate more effective ways to target treatment delays after a cancer diagnosis.
This research, which is led by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in collaboration with the National Cancer Audit Collaborating Centre , will bring together patients, clinicians, data experts, and policymakers to address an urgent national priority for cancer care.
Approach
We’ll be focusing on four major types of cancer: bowel, breast, lung, and oesophageal. This is because national guidelines recommend surgery or radiotherapy as the main treatments in the early stages of these cancers – and surgery and radiotherapy are most prone to delay.
To organise the research, we’ll be using an innovative cancer learning system model that will integrate multiple research methods – qualitative, quantitative, and co-design – over a period of 3.5 years to investigate ways how to improve timeliness of curative surgery or radiotherapy for people with cancer.
The learning model will support understanding problems, developing solutions, and evaluating them, by combining three key components: high quality data, innovative co-design techniques and an inclusive online community. We’ll keep a strong focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion, throughout, and will keep patients and the public at the heart of the project. Patients, public contributors, and stakeholders will shape priorities and guide all stages of the project.
In bringing together national networks of clinicians with data scientists, healthcare improvement researchers and people with lived experience of cancer, the project will not only help improve the timeliness of cancer treatment but also create a long-lasting resource for improving cancer care.
Project team
Funding and ethics
This project is funded by the National Institute for Health Research.