Eye Cancer: Health Services
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that NHS England meets the 62-day referral to treatment target for patients diagnosed with rare eye cancers.
Answered by Mrs Sharon Hodgson
We know that people diagnosed with rare and less common cancers, including ocular melanoma, often face some of the poorest outcomes, and this is unacceptable. Specific diagnosis to treatment waiting time data is unavailable for ocular melanoma, however, we do collect data on the 28-day Faster Diagnosis Cancer Waiting Times Standard for the brain and central nervous system. The following table shows the percentage of suspected brain/central nervous system cancers that meet the 28-day Faster Diagnosis Cancer Waiting Times Standard, for January 2025 and January 2026, as well as the 12-month percentage change:
| January 2026 | January 2025 | 12-month Change |
Faster Diagnosis Standard | 80.0% | 79.9% | 0.1% |
The recently published National Cancer Plan sets a clear ambition to meet all cancer waiting time standards, including the 62-day treatment standard, by the end of this Parliament, ensuring that patients get faster diagnosis and start treatment sooner. We will achieve this through a modernised, more productive cancer pathway, expanding diagnostic capacity and giving the most challenged trusts intensive support to deliver the improvements patients rightly expect.
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