Cancer treatments

The National Disease Registration Service (NDRS), in partnership with Cancer Research UK (CRUK), has produced population-based statistics on the patients recorded to have received radiotherapy, Systemic Anti-Cancer Treatment (SACT) and tumour resections for their tumour in England. This work focusses on the initial time period following diagnosis within which most patients' first course of treatment occurred, with the intention of capturing adjuvant and neo-adjuvant treatments as well as the primary treatment.

These statistics on cancer treatments aim to support the understanding of how patients are treated for their cancer diagnosis and how this varies between cancer types. This understanding is vital to assess variation and make improvements to treatment pathways. Stage at diagnosis and the presence of comorbidities amongst other factors have an important impact on treatment patterns.

This publication is an Official Statistic.

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 is collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Disease Registration Service, which is part of NHS England.

Please click on the dashboard link below to view the interactive tool, which presents the proportion of tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2022 recorded as having received radiotherapy, SACT, tumour resection, or a combination of these. This can be viewed by factors at point of diagnosis that may affect treatment, including cancer type, year of diagnosis, stage at diagnosis, age, gender, deprivation, ethnicity, and comorbidities, or by Cancer Alliance. Please note that the demographic factors and Cancer Alliance dashboards are now accessed via the same dashboard.

OPEN TREATMENT DASHBOARD (Please note this opens in a new window)

The methodology for linking treatment data to the cancer registration data is detailed in the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) below.

The code for the publication is available via the Cancer-Treatments GitHub repository.

The data sets used to capture treatment information include the:

• National Cancer Registration Dataset (NCRD) 
• Systematic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) data set (also see the SACT data profile)
• Radiotherapy Data Set (RTDS) (also see the RTDS data profile)
• Inpatient and outpatient Hospital Episode Statistics (HES)

Where a patient has been diagnosed with one or multiple cancers over 18 months, then all of the above treatment datasets were used to identify treatments. However, if the patient has been diagnosed with multiple cancers within 18 months, then only the tumour linked cancer registration treatment data was used. This is because SACT, RTDS and HES can only identify the person that had the treatment, and not the specific tumour.

A tumour resection is an attempt to surgically remove the whole of the primary tumour. These have been identified using OPCS-4 codes through consultation with site-specific clinicians. Surgeries included for haematological neoplasms include relevant transplant procedures.

Surgical tumour resections have not been defined for any of the cancer sites included for 'Other: Malignant neoplasms', 'Other: Non-malignant neoplasms' or 'Blood Cancer: Other haematological neoplasms'. However, some of these tumours could have been treated with surgery.

Radiotherapy includes both curative and palliative external beam radiotherapy procedures, chemoradiotherapy, radiosurgery, radioisotope therapy and brachytherapy.

SACT includes both curative and palliative SACT, chemoradiotherapy, immunotherapy and biological therapies. Hormonal therapy is excluded unless used in combination with other SACT. Also excluded are other supportive drugs such as zoledronic acid, pamidronate, and denosumab. SACT treatment data is extracted from HES inpatient and outpatient data, in addition to NCRD and SACT.

The tumours in the 'Other care' category may have received:

• treatment other than SACT, radiotherapy and tumour resection (such as hormonal therapy or management of symptoms)
• treatment outside of the time frame assessed
• treatment in a private setting
• or there may be data missing from the datasets used.
• for those types where surgery is not defined, other care may also include patients who have undergone tumour resection treatment.

All patients diagnosed with malignant cancer in England in 2013-2022 were included in the cohort, excluding males with gynaecological cancer and females with

prostate cancer. This may have excluded some transgender and non-binary patients. The NDRS Inequalities in cancer webpage provides more details. Death certificate only registrations are included (1% of the cohort).

Treatments occurring in the period from 1 month before diagnosis to either 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 months after diagnosis are displayed for tumours diagnosed in 2013 to 2022. The time period within which the majority of first course of treatments occurred varies by cancer site and treatment type. Therefore, an appropriate time period for each cancer type has been chosen using a data-driven approach in consultation with clinicians.

For more information, and a sensitivity analysis showing the effect of varying the time periods, see the CAS-SOP 4.10 above.

For pancreatic tumours, a much lower proportion than expected of early stage tumours are recorded to have been resected. Feedback from clinical experts highlighted that this does not fit with clinical experience, so further investigation is needed to understand whether all resections are being captured by the data and methodology.

Figures for non-melanoma skin cancers (NMSC) are currently experimental and likely to be undercount surgical tumour resections.

The dashboards are updated annually. The last update was on 29 May 2025 and the next expected release is Spring 2026.

You can download the data according to specific filters by selecting the download button, 'Download data for selected inputs' on the left-hand side of the dashboard. The full data set can be downloaded via the Downloads tab, using the link labelled 'Download all data'.

The tool is produced by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) as part of the Cancer Research UK - NHS England Partnership.

Please send any feedback or queries to [email protected]. Please do not include sensitive or patient identifiable information.

Find out more about the methodology and download a copy of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for linking treatment data to the cancer registration data in the methodology section above.