Responding to a report from Cancer Research UK on how David Cameron’s NHS re-organisation brought confusion and a loss of leadership that is damaging cancer care makes devastating reading for David Cameron. The verdict from cancer experts is clear: David Cameron’s NHS re-organisation has damaged cancer care just as Labour always warned it would.
After a decade of progress, cancer patients are waiting longer for tests and treatment. This is causing huge anxiety for thousands of families and the most frustrating thing of all is that the Prime Minister was explicitly warned that this would happen but he chose to ignore it. His reorganisation disrupted the successful cancer networks and, in the words of the report, left a "vacuum" on the cancer agenda. This explains why the NHS is now missing the national cancer standard for the first time.
Cancer care has gone downhill under this Government and they have nobody but themselves to blame for that. David Cameron must urgently set out a convincing plan to halt the decline in cancer standards.
The most recent data from NHS England show that in the first six months of 2014, the NHS missed the target for 85% of cancer patients to begin treatment with 62 days of GP referral. It was missed in Q4 2013/14 and Q1 2014/15 - the first time since its introduction in 2009.