The number of patients being diagnosed with cancer at an early stage in England has reached a record high. Nearly three in five patients are being diagnosed at stages one and two, when the cancer is easier to treat. Pressures on the NHS however, mean targets for starting treatment are still not where they'd like them to be, said Professor Peter Johnson, Clinical director for cancer, NHS England.
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00:00This is really important because ever since we've been recording the stage at which we
00:04diagnose people's cancer this is the first time that we've seen it going up as we've
00:08come out of the pandemic and we've put a huge amount of effort into making sure that people
00:13can understand the symptoms so that they know when to come forward to get checks and also we've been
00:18doing some work to actually go out and find people for example with our lung health checks program
00:22targeting people over the age of 55 who've smoked seeing if they are at risk of lung cancer and
00:28inviting them in for CT scans and it's these kind of initiatives which have made a huge difference
00:33to the likelihood of getting diagnosed early and of course that really matters because
00:37if your cancer is diagnosed in early stage that's what gives us the best chance of successful
00:42treatment. We're doing everything we can to speed this up and in fact the figures this year are much
00:46better than they were last year and we're continuing to work on that. People shouldn't
00:50be waiting a long time to start treatment if they are they need to speak to the team that
00:53are looking after them to make sure that they're being prioritized in the system and even as
00:58we deal with all the winter pressures on the NHS we've asked hospitals around the country
01:02to continue to prioritize cancer tests and cancer treatment because as you say it's really
01:06important that people especially when they've got a diagnosis of cancer get treated as rapidly as
01:11possible and that's something that we're very strongly focused on. The numbers are getting
01:15better we've still got a long way to go in terms of catching up to where we'd like to be
01:20by the end of this year around 70 percent of people will be getting treatment within two
01:23months of referral we want to get to 85 which is what we're aiming for over the next couple of years.