Cancer: Diagnosis
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his department is making on its target to reduce the time taken for cancer diagnoses.
Answered by Ashley Dalton
The Department is supporting the National Health Service to meet the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), for 75% of patients to be diagnosed or have cancer ruled out within 28 days of being referred urgently by their general practitioner for suspected cancer. NHS England collects and publishes monthly FDS performance data nationally and for individual cancer groups.
To achieve the FDS, NHS England rolled out public awareness campaigns of cancer signs and symptoms, streamlined referral routes for different cancer types, and is increasing the availability of diagnostic capacity through the roll-out of more community diagnostic centres.
NHS England has also achieved full roll out of non-specific symptom pathways for patients who present with vague and non-site-specific symptoms which do not clearly align to a tumour type.
Between October 2024 and September 2025, approximately 193,000 more patients got a cancer diagnosis or the all-clear on time than in the year from July 2023 to June 2024.
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