Skip to main content

Publication, Part of

Cancer Services profile, 2021 annual update

Publication Date:
7 Dec 2021
Geographic Coverage:
England
Page contents

Summary

The interactive Cancer Services profile tool has been updated to include the latest financial year of data that are available, collated by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS). For 28 indicators, the latest data is now available for the financial year 2020 to 2021; for the cancer incidence indicator the tool has been updated to include the 2019 to 2020 data.

Background

The profiles have been designed to support commissioners and health professionals to assess the impact of cancer on their local population and make decisions about services.

These profiles present data by general practitioner (GP) practice, primary care network (PCN), clinical commissioning group (CCG) and national level on:

  • cancer incidence and screening
  • Two-Week Wait (TWW) referrals 
  • diagnostic services
  • emergency presentations and admissions

Data are shown for the 6,548 GP practices which have a list size of 1,000 or more patients and were either listed in the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) 2020 to 2021 or were listed in both the Attribution Data Set (ADS) and GP patient survey (GPPS) datasets.

On 1 October 2021, responsibility for the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) transferred from Public Health England (PHE) to NHS Digital. NHS Digital is the data controller for this data. The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) as part of the NDRS is still responsible for collecting data on patients with cancer in England and continues to produce the Cancer Services profile publications.

The previous release of these statistics can be found at the Cancer services profiles: 2020 annual update link below.

Acknowledgements

This work uses data that has been provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support. It is sourced from NHS Digital, and NHS England and NHS Improvement and collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service, which is part of NHS Digital.

Key Facts

The latest national updates show that:

  • the number of new malignant cancer cases was updated for 2019 to 2020, reporting 320,711 new cases (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) and 531 cases per 100,000 population. 
  • for the financial year 2020 to 2021, 61.3% of females attended breast cancer screening within the target period. 69.1% of females aged 25 to 49 and 75% of females aged 50 to 64 attended cervical screening within the target period. For bowel cancer screening, 66.8% of 60 to 74 years olds attended in the last 30 months.
  • for diagnostic investigations per 100,000 population, there were 511 colonoscopy procedures, 759 upper gastro-intestinal (GI) endoscopy procedures and 246 sigmoidoscopy procedures performed in the financial year 2020 to 2021.
  • the rate of individuals diagnosed with cancer through an emergency route was 87 per 100,000 population in the financial year 2020 to 2021.
  • there were 3,389 two-week wait (TWW) referrals per 100,000 population in the financial year 2020 to 2021. The proportion of new cancer cases treated that were referred by TWW (detection rate) was 54.8%. 

Please note that there have been changes in trends due to COVID-19 impacting on some activity from March 2020 onwards.

Last edited: 6 December 2021 10:33 am