The National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) annual report provides information on the process of care and outcomes for patients diagnosed with lung cancer between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2019 in Wales and Guernsey and between 1 January 2019 and 31 December 2020 in England.
Key findings
The report utilises the rapid cancer registration dataset for England, which makes data available more quickly. However, it is missing some of the poorer prognosis patients and does not provide data by ‘trust first seen’. Results are presented by alliance level only and there will be no outlier process. Despite this, there are important key findings:
- The 1-year survival of patients in England and Wales in 2019 was at least 40.7% (compared with 39% in 2018). This is the highest achieved so far and shows that initiatives prior to the pandemic were improving lung cancer outcomes.
- In 2019 in England, curative treatment rates of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with stage I/II and good performance status were 81%. This metric fell significantly to 73% in 2020 with a drop in surgical resection rate from 20% to 15%.
- Compared with 2019, lung cancer patients diagnosed in England in 2020 had worse performance status, were more likely to be diagnosed via emergency presentation and less likely to have a pathological diagnosis.
This report published on 13 January 2022 but at that time, the 2020 survival data were not available. Since then, these data have become available and are presented and analysed in the one page summary addendum and data spreadsheet available to download below.