The Right Care team has just launched an Atlas of Variation for Lung Cancer and the DH cancer team work on earlier diagnosis on lung, bowel and breast cancer has also reported.  There are opportunities here for respiratory networks to learn from and build on this.

Their alert says:

• The percentage of patients who received a test to tell them what type of lung cancer they have
• Patients discussed by a lung cancer care team or multidisciplinary team of healthcare professionals
• Patients seen by a lung cancer nurse specialist
• Patients receiving an operation for any type of lung cancer
• Patients receiving active anti-cancer treatment

The statistics used to create this map are from National Lung Cancer Audit, which is carried out by the NHS Information Centre, in partnership with Royal College of Physicians – the audit is commissioned by The Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP).

“There is good evidence that the audit data has been used in many organisations to drive data service improvement and by inference improve the standards of care and patient outcomes.” (National Lung Cancer Audit 2011)

The Earlier Diagnosis report can be downloaded here.  It concludes that from the first analyses, many of the initiatives in lung cancer did not achieve an increase in diagnosis, but that further sub-group analysis is needed to see if specific populations benefited.