How can we improve care for people with cancer?

On Wednesday we launched our brand new report on patient experience in Parliament called Improving care for people with cancer. The event was a great success – loads of MPs came along to chat about the report and show their support for improving every cancer patient’s experience of treatment and care.

_{Andrew Jones MP}

What was the event about?

Last week you might have seen the news that NHS England published results from the third national Cancer Patient Experience Survey. The Survey aims to record and measure how cancer patients feel about their experience of care, such as:

• whether they felt they’d been treated with respect and dignity throughout their treatment
• whether they had confidence in the staff looking after them
• whether they felt they had been given enough information.

The good news is that experiences of cancer care are improving. 88% of patients describe their care as excellent or very good. What’s more, around half of all trusts have improved on last year’s results.

But, as I highlighted in a previous blog, more still needs to be done. Macmillan's Chief Executive Ciarán Devane, commenting on the most recent Survey results, noted that, ‘if half can improve, it is strange that a third made no improvement, and some care even worsened...’

Prioritising patient experience

Our new report, Improving care for people with cancer, includes a number of recommendations for how we think patient experience can get better.

One of the key messages from the report is that patient experience is not being prioritised throughout the NHS. This is despite us hearing from patients that it is as important to them as the other aspects of quality care: clinical effectiveness and safety. We also know that a bad patient experience can impact on a person’s health, be related to poor recovery and cost the NHS money.

^{Nic Dakin MP}

On Wednesday we asked MPs to show their support by writing to key decision-makers to ask them to prioritise patient experience. MPs could also tweet their photo with one of our brilliant props. These props showed the three most important elements of patient experience as described to us by people affected by cancer: communication, coordination and involvement.

You can check out all the tweets from the event by searching for the hashtag #patientexp.

What’s next?

We’ll be continuing to talk to MPs and other key decision-makers about our report and about how we can work together to ensure improvements are made. If you have any comments on the report, we would love to hear from you.