Monday, March 31, 2025
Cancer survival rates highlight Welsh Labour's failure on health
They say that official data from the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit of Public Health Wales confirms that 63.1 per cent of patients aged 15-99, diagnosed from 2017-2021, survived their cancer five years from diagnosis, but, this rate has remained stable without improving since the 2014-18 diagnosis period:
Before then, five-year cancer survival had been steadily improving for several decades.
Survival from cancer one year after diagnosis dropped significantly to 71.9 per cent in 2020, then rebounded to 75.2 per cent in 2021, marking a recovery towards pre-pandemic levels.
There are survival differences between different types of cancer. For example, since the pandemic, one-year lung cancer survival did not recover as well as for other major cancers.
But the most damning statistics reveal stark inequalities in survival rates:
For people diagnosed 2017-2021, 70.1 per cent from the least deprived areas survived cancer five years, compared to just 51.8 per cent in the most deprived areas. This gap has hardly changed since 2002-2006.
Trends in survival inequalities in Wales can vary, depending on the type of cancer.
For bowel (colorectal) cancer, five-year survival was 66.0 per cent for people living in the least deprived areas, compared to 49.1 per cent in the most deprived areas.
This inequality gap is wider than for the previous diagnosis period.
Ten-year lung cancer survival greatly improved in the least deprived areas (from 8.3 per cent to 14.7 per cent), but improved only slightly in the most deprived areas (from 6.8 per cent to 8.5 per cent), widening inequalities.
Professor Dyfed Wyn Huws, director of the Welsh Cancer Intelligence and Surveillance Unit, said: “The inequalities in Wales’ cancer survival – that are widening in some cases – are troubling.
“Also of concern is that despite many decades of steady improvement in overall cancer survival, several years before the pandemic it stopped significantly improving.
Labour have been in charge of health in Wales for nearly twenty eight years and the health service has deteriorated over that period. Labour will argue that the last UK government underfunded the service, but for a large part of that period they ran both governments, and this argument doesnt explain why outcomes are better in England.
If tackling health inequalities is not a priority for Labour then what is the point of them?
