Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Spectators podcast. I'm Kate Andrews.

As the UK's vaccine rollout provides a way out of the COVID pandemic, we are set to discover a host of new crises created over a year spent in and out

of lockdown. The cancer crisis is just starting to unfold, as it's estimated around 3 million

people missed cancer screenings between last April and August alone. How do we begin to play catch-up

as NHS waiting lists grow? What could have been done differently? And what

lessons can be learned to help cancer patients access faster and better care? Joining me today to

discuss all of this, we have Delth Morgan, Chief Executive of Breast Cancer Now, Professor Peter

Johnson, the National Clinical Director for Cancer at NHS England, Gordon Wishart, the chief executive

for Czech for cancer, and Neil Pumford, the asset strategy lead at Abbey. This podcast is kindly

sponsored by Abvey. So Gordon, I'm going to start with you. Perhaps you can describe what has

happened to cancer care since the pandemic first struck. Yeah, well, I think lockdown had two main effects on cancer services in the UK.

Firstly, with the state-home message, trouble seeing a GP,

and then the disruption to cancer services due to the redeployment on COVID,

we saw about 350,000 less urgent cancer referrals in 2020.

In addition to that, we had suspension of the NHS cancer screening programs.

We normally screen somewhere in the region of 200,000 people a week for breast,

bowel or cervical cancer, and we normally diagnose about 400 screen-detected

cancers a week.

So the combination of both of those things has resulted in somewhere in the region of 40,000

people who were undiagnosed in 2020, and some of those may remain still undiagnosed.

And I think as a result of that, the more worrying statistics that are

coming out now is that we're seeing a later stage presentation with something like 7% of people

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