Responding to the publication of the plan, Skin Analytics CEO Neil Daly said:
“The National Cancer Plan represents a meaningful step toward addressing England’s persistent underperformance in cancer outcomes. The commitment to finally explore measures to prevent cancer and speed up waiting times, alongside promises of ring fenced funding for diagnostics, offers grounds for cautious optimism. However, the Plan is light on how this will succeed without a clear workforce strategy and it misses the opportunity to address some of this through innovation.
“The Plan rightly identifies that the NHS ‘struggles to adopt evidence-based innovations at scale,’ promising a new era of speed and adoption. Yet, when it comes to the UK’s most common cancer – skin cancer – the Plan ignores existing, proven technology that solves problems around waiting times and closing workforce gaps.
“For the last decade, the NHS has invested millions of pounds of public funds to evaluate a world leading British AI tool for skin cancer. This technology has secured Europe’s first and only Class III AI as a Medical Device (AIaMD) regulatory approval, assessed nearly 250,000 patients in 30 NHS Trusts, found more than 19,000 cancers and released over 77,000 dermatology appointments. It was cleared for early use by NICE from the core NHS budget 9 months ago with a positive return on investment for the NHS.
“One in four dermatology posts are empty. In the absence of a meaningful workforce plan to address this shortage, we risk seeing delays and a deterioration in outcomes for a speciality that has historically out-performed other cancer survival rates, and failing the 414,000 patients on a waiting list for dermatology, 6,700 of whom are expected to have high risk cancer.
“We cannot level the playing field of patient inequality with rhetoric. We do it by deploying tools that are blind to postcodes and capable of clearing backlogs now. This National Cancer Plan is silent on how we can do that for the largest referring cancer speciality.”
