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Towards Excellence: A review of brain tumour care for children across the UK

The Tessa Jowell Brain Cancer Mission (TJBCM) has today released the UK’s first comprehensive review of paediatric neuro-oncology services, shining a light on both the excellence and inequities in care for children and young people with a brain tumour. Covering 15 centres, representing 94% of the UK population, the review assessed 168 elements of the patient pathway, and draws on extensive centre data, clinical interviews and feedback from more than 200 families.d

This landmark report is the result of a national collaboration across the brain tumour community. TJBCM worked in partnership with leading charities, including brainstrust, Brain Tumour Research, The Brain Tumour Charity, Children with Cancer UK, Brainwaves Northern Ireland, Brain Tumour Support and others. Contributions from academic experts, NHS clinicians, researchers, patient organisations, and critically, children and families, ensure the report reflects clinical excellence and the lived reality of those navigating a brain tumour diagnosis.

Helen Bulbeck, Director of Services at brainstrust, said: “This report gives voice to what families have been telling us for years: that while outstanding care exists, it is not accessible to everyone. By working together, we can ensure no child is left behind because of where they live. The recommendations laid out here provide a vital roadmap to equity and brainstrust is proud to stand alongside TJBCM and our partners to drive that change.”

The report tells us that every hospital is staffed by highly committed professionals providing safe and effective core treatment in line with international standards, such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, but there is variation in other areas. Notably the report shows significant variations and shortcomings exist on how children are supported on their brain tumour journey:

  • Almost all NHS centres (13/15) reported shortages of rehabilitation staff, and fewer than half (7/15) were able to offer specialist rehabilitation to patients who live far from the main hospital of the NHS centre
  • A third (5/15) of NHS centres lacked specialised neuropsychology support and, across all centres, patients waited up to 1 year (19 weeks on average) for outpatient access
  • Only half of patients and families (49%) reported access to a play specialist

Brain tumours remain the leading cause of cancer-related death in children, with around 420 diagnoses annually in the UK. Treatment is complex, often life-altering, and requires coordinated expertise across imaging, surgery, oncology, rehabilitation, psychological care and research. While the review identified excellent practice, it also exposes unacceptable variation in access to essential services and clinical trials.

Six centres have been awarded Tessa Jowell Centres of Excellence for Children status. The remaining nine are now part of the Tessa Jowell Network, committed to continual improvement. The report’s 13 recommendations aim to drive equity across the system and underpin the launch of the Tessa Jowell Academy for Paediatrics in 2025 a new national platform to support training, collaboration and service improvement.

Download the report in full here.

Need help now? If you are supporting a child with a brain tumour then we are here to help. Call on 01983 292405 or email hello@brainstrust.org.uk

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Introduction

The Brain Tumour Data Dashboard lets you explore up -to-date, population level data about the brain tumours diagnosed in England between 2013 and 2015. Using the drop down menus on the left you can select different groups of patients to view in the charts below. In these charts the number of patients for every 100 diagnoses is displayed as images of people. Patients have been grouped by date of diagnosis, type of tumour, age, gender, and region in England.

For each group of patients you can explore the different routes to diagnosis, the proportion of those who received chemotherapy or radiotherapy, as well as the survival of the patients within each group. For more information about what these metrics mean please see the glossary.

How to use

  1. Select the year of diagnosis using the drop down menu.
  2. Select your patient group of interest from the four drop down menus in the following order:
    1. Tumour group
    2. Age at diagnosis
    3. Region of England
    4. Gender of patient
  3. To view a second chart to compare different groups of patients, click the ‘compare’ button.The second chart will appear below the first chart.

*Note that the tool is best used on a laptop or tablet rather than a mobile phone*

Unavailable data

Some of the data in these charts is not available.There are two main reasons for this:

  1. How the data has been grouped

If you cannot select a patient group from the drop down menus, the data is unavailable because of how the data has been organised.

Public Health England has grouped the data like a branching tree. The bottom of the tree contains all the patients with brain tumours, and then each branch divides the data by a certain characteristics, like age, or location of tumour. But the data is divided in an order, starting with location of the tumour (endocrine or brain), then by age, region, and gender. Age is at the start because it makes a bigger difference to survival rates and treatment rates than gender or region. Sometimes, after the data has been split by type of tumour and age, there is not enough data to be split again. This is because to protect patient confidentiality groups cannot contain less than 100 patients. Because some groups cannot be split further, you cannot create ‘totals’ for everyone by region or gender. For example, you cannot see results for all ages by region, or all brain tumours by gender. If these totals were calculated and released, it might be possible to identify patients, which is why Public Health England cannot release this data.

  1. Statistical reasons and data availability

If you can select a patient group from the chart menus, but the chart does not display, the data is unavailable for one of several reasons:

  1. Data is not yet available for the selected year from Public Health England.
  2. Data is not available because the data quality is too poor to release this statistic.
  3. Data is not available as the statistic is not appropriate for this group.
  4. Data is not available because the standard error of the estimate was greater than 20% and so the estimate has been supressed.

Up to date brain tumour data

Brain tumour data may influence the decisions you make about your care. Data also helps you understand the bigger picture, or landscape, in which you find yourself.

Brain tumour data and statistics influence the focus, and work of organisations like brainstrust. The information helps us to understand the scale and impact of the problems we are setting out to solve.

This tool helps you understand the landscape in which you find yourself having been diagnosed with a brain tumour. This landscape can be particularly tricky to navigate as there are many different types of brain tumour, all of which have a different impact.

The information you see represents the most up-to-date, official, population level brain tumour data available for England. Over time we will be adding to the brain tumour data available and publishing reports, with recommendations, as a result of what we learn from this data.

The data behind this content has come from Public Health England’s National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) and is a direct result of the ‘Get Data Out’ project.

This project provides anonymised population level brain tumour data for public use in the form of standard output tables, accessible here: http://cancerdata.nhs.uk/standardoutput

Incidence

The number or rate (per head of population) of new cases of a disease diagnosed in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of cases divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Malignant

Malignant tumours which grow by invasion into surrounding tissues and have the ability to metastasise to distant sites

Mortality

The number or rate (per head of population) of deaths in a given population during a specified time period (usually a calendar year). The crude rate is the total number of deaths divided by the mid-year population, usually expressed per 100,000 population.

Non-malignant

Not cancerous. Non-malignant tumours may grow larger but do not spread to other parts of the body.

Survival

The length of time from the date of diagnosis for a disease, such as cancer, that patients diagnosed with the disease are still alive. In a clinical trial, measuring the survival is one way to see how well a new treatment works. Also called ‘overall survival’ or ‘OS’.

Routes to Diagnosis

Under the ‘Routes to Diagnosis’ tab in the Brain Tumour Data Dashboard, you can explore the ways patients have been diagnosed with brain tumours. There are many ways, or routes, for cancers to be diagnosed in the NHS. A ‘route to diagnosis’ is the series of events between a patient and the healthcare system that leads to a diagnosis of cancer. The routes include:

  1. Two Week Wait

Patients are urgently referred by their GP for suspected cancer via the Two Week Wait system and are seen by a specialist within 2 weeks where they are diagnosed.

  1. GP referral

Diagnosis via a GP referral includes routine and urgent referrals where the patient was not referred under the Two Week Wait system.

  1. Emergency Presentation

Cancers can be diagnosed via emergency situations such as via A&E, emergency GP referral, emergency transfer or emergency admission.

  1. Outpatient

Outpatient cancer diagnoses include diagnoses via an elective route which started with an outpatient appointment that is either a self-referral or consultant to consultant referral. (It does not include those under the Two Week Wait referral system).

  1. Inpatient elective

Diagnosis via an inpatient elective route is where diagnosis occurs after the patient has been admitted into secondary care from a waiting list, or where the admission is booked or planned.

  1. Death Certificate Only

Diagnoses made by Death Certificate Only are made where there is no more information about the cancer diagnosis other than the cancer related death notifications. The date of diagnosis is the same as that of the date of death.

  1. Unknown

For some patients with a cancer diagnosis, there is no relevant data available to understand the route to diagnosis.

 

More information

If any of the statistical terms in this section of the brainstrust website are hard to understand, we recommend looking them up here:

Cancer Research UK’s Cancer Statistics Explained

http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/cancer-stats-explained/statistics-terminology-explained#heading-Seven

If you are looking for help understanding terms relating specifically to brain tumours, and treatment, then the brainstrust glossary is available here:

https://www.brainstrust.org.uk/advice-glossary.php