Hello and welcome to this special podcast brought to you by the New Statesman Spotlight team.

We cover policy for those who shape it and the businesses it affects. I'm Becky Slack.

In this episode we're discussing a vital issue that affects tens of thousands of people every year and the poorest worst lung cancer.

November is officially lung cancer awareness month. There are around 48,000 new cases of lung cancer every year in the UK.

It's the third most common form of cancer and in 2020 it was the leading form of cancer death worldwide.

But it doesn't affect everyone equally. Incident rates are far higher among the most deprived groups of people in the UK and there is too often a postcode lottery when it comes to diagnosis.

Lung cancer is generally less survivable than other forms of cancer, so early diagnosis is vital.

Over the next 20 minutes also I'm going to explore the reasons behind these inequalities and what can be done about it with a panel of esteemed expert guests.

This episode has been fully funded by MSD, one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies who are active in several key areas of global health, including immunization and oncology.

Joining me from MSD is David Lung, director of the business oncology unit. Also on the panel we have Lorraine Dallas, director of information prevention and support at Roy Castle Foundation, the only charity in the UK to focus solely on lung cancer care.

And I'm delighted to welcome an extremely senior clinical and medical expert, Professor David Baldwin, chair of NHS England's clinical expert group for lung cancer. Welcome to you all.

Let's start with you, Professor Baldwin. Firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your work and your expertise in this area?

Thank you very much indeed for having me on this podcast. I am a lung specialist, a research physician from Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

And I've been in that role since 1996 as a consultant and subspecialized in lung cancer, doing a lot of clinical work, a lot of pathway development work.

And the other side to my job is working for the University of Nottingham, where I do a lot of academic work, started off in lung cancer epidemiology, looking at variation in outcomes and services.

And as part of that, we developed the National Optimal Lung Cancer Pathway, which is a major national initiative and also now developed in Wales and Scotland.

And then I also did a lot of work on lung cancer screening. And again, we now have a recommendation to UK National Screening Committee to start a screening program in all four UK countries, and have a pretty successful pilot program going on in England at the moment.

So in a nutshell, that's what I've been about over the last few years.

So that's a long time and a lot of experience. What trends have you observed in lung cancer diagnosis and treatment over that time?

From a clinical perspective, we do things a lot better now overall. We are better at diagnosing and staging people more accurately.

And as a result of that, we have more patients that I think are correctly offered for treatment in terms of the right fitness, the right stage, and then the right treatment.

And we've also seen some change and shift into the clinical presentations of patients with lung cancer from a good deal of people used to present with really quite late stage disease in almost extremists.

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