Today’s report shows huge improvements in radiotherapy services are needed

For several years, Cancer Research UK has been calling on the government to invest in improvements to our radiotherapy services across the UK. At the National Cancer Research Institute conference this week, the Department of Health has published a report on radiotherapy services in England.

We’re really pleased – our Voice for Radiotherapy campaign urged the Government to publish an action plan to give an update since the last one was published 5 years ago. The report builds on the Prime Minister’s recent announcements on radiotherapy, and will hopefully help to drive progress across the service. For the very first time, this report allows us to use real-time data to compare services across England to see how well we’re doing.

It’s not a very pretty picture.

Huge improvements are needed if we are to ensure that the right patients are getting the right sort of radiotherapy. Over the next four years, activity must increase by two-thirds if it is to keep pace with the needs of UK patients. And much more of this should be advanced radiotherapy, such as intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) – which targets treatment more closely to the tumour, sparing healthy tissue – and image guided radiotherapy (IGRT) – which tracks the tumour’s movements to ensure the radiation is hitting the right spot.

By 2016, we will need to double the number of linear accelerators (the machines that deliver radiotherapy), both to match increases in demand and to make sure some of the UK’s ageing machines are replaced on schedule.

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Today's radiotherapy report is a significant achievement

We often talk about radiotherapy as the unsung hero of cancer treatment – it helps cure more people than cancer drugs, yet few people think of it as a modern treatment.

That’s why we’re campaigning to improve radiotherapy services – more needs to be done to ensure that this cornerstone of cancer treatment is being used effectively across the country.

So we were particularly interested to see that the Government has published the first annual report of data about radiotherapy in the NHS.

We’ve written extensively before about the importance of collecting such data in order to improve cancer care.

The reason is simple – you can’t improve something if you don’t know how well it’s working in the first place.

Today’s report from the Department of Health focuses primarily on the not-insignificant achievement of collecting these data in the first place. But it also raises some important questions about variations in radiotherapy services and access to this vital treatment across the country.

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