The Christie NHS FT Annual Report & Accounts 2019-20

The Christie NHS Foundation Trust Annual Report & Accounts 2019-20

receives summary reports on the outcome measures. Reports are discussed at the quarterly morbidity and mortality meetings with the technical reports available to board members if required. Cancer survival is dependent upon the type of disease, some cancers have worse prognosis than others e.g. lung cancer and therefore geographical differences in survival are often related to the relative incidence of poor prognosis cancers in that region. In the North West there is a particularly high rate of lifestyle related cancers in particular smoking related cancers that have poor prognosis. As a specialist cancer centre The Christie only sees patients in specific parts of the patient pathway following diagnosis rather than at the point of diagnosis and may not see some patients at all depending on their type of cancer and the stage of their cancer at diagnosis. For some cancer types only the most advanced patients are referred to The Christie. For others none of the most severe cancer patients are referred here. These differences need to be accounted for when benchmarking survival outcomes for Christie patients against national figures. Where national survival data are available by stage at diagnosis we are able to show comparable if not better 1 year survival for our patients compared to the national average (Table 1). We also publish our own outcomes reports available for each cancer type. Five year cancer survival

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