Emergency presentations of cancer

This dashboard presents the proportion of cancer patients first seen as an inpatient in hospital which presented as an emergency in England. The proportions are provided, by financial quarter, for sub-Integrated Care Boards (sub-ICB), Cancer Alliances (CA) and a range of cancer sites.

Acknowledgement

This work uses data that has been provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support. The data are collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Disease Registration Service, which is part of NHS England.

The Emergency Presentation metric shows the estimated proportion of cancers where patients first presented to the health system as an emergency. This is an important driver of cancer outcomes: patients with cancers that present as an emergency suffer significantly worse outcomes. The metric estimates the true proportion of emergency presentations using first admissions to hospital as a proxy for diagnosis to allow more rapid reporting.

More information, including data downloads, can be found on the Official statistics collection page for Emergency presentations of cancer.

The dashboard reports data for all malignant cancers excluding non-melanoma skin cancer. Data for in situ breast cancer is provided in the data download, but it is not included in the dashboard due to a consistently low number of emergency presentations.

The dashboard includes separate pages for Sub-ICB variation, Cancer Alliance variation and Cancer site variation, which all contain a figure and a table showing the quarterly proportion of emergency presentations and a 1-year rolling average.

The dashboard includes quarterly data from October to November 2017 (quarter 3 of the financial year 2017 to 2018) up to July to September 2022 (quarter 2 of the financial year 2022 to 2023).

The data download (see Downloads section below) includes quarterly data from January to March 2010 (quarter 4 of the financial year 2009 to 2010) up to July to September 2022 (quarter 2 of the financial year 2022 to 2023).

Data are drawn from the Hospital Episode Statistics Admitted Patient Care data and linked to the National Cancer Registration Dataset.

This dashboard will not be updated with new data, but it will remain available for now.

In future, we plan to add Emergency presentations data to the Rapid Cancer Registration Data (RCRD) dashboard.

The tool is produced by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS). Please send any feedback or queries to [email protected] 

Please do not include sensitive or patient identifiable information.

Data downloads, can be found on the Official statistics collection page for Emergency presentations of cancer.