A message from Dr Neil Bayman, Executive Medical Director at The Christie, on the launch of the Government’s new cancer plan.
As the Government publishes its National Cancer Plan today (4 February 2026) – a date that also marks World Cancer Day – this moment offers a powerful reminder of the collective effort required to improve outcomes for everyone affected by cancer.
The National Cancer Plan for England sets out a long-term ambition to stabilise and transform cancer services over the next decade, with a renewed national commitment improving cancer outcomes by delivering faster diagnosis, quicker treatment, and the support to live well with cancer.
As a specialist cancer centre, The Christie has an important responsibility to play our part in delivering these ambitions for patients across Greater Manchester and beyond.
A core ambition of the National Cancer Plan is shifting more cancer care out of hospital and into local neighbourhoods. Neighbourhood oncology is one of the ways The Christie is moving away from care organised primarily around hospital attendances and shifting to managing cancer as a long-term condition in neighbourhoods, delivering more care closer to home and designing services around people’s lives.
The Christie already has an established track record of delivering closer-to-home services across Greater Manchester, including our Christie at sites in Oldham, Salford and Macclesfield, SACT delivered across multiple sites and through The Christie at Home which currently delivers 9000 treatments in patients homes per year, local outpatient clinics, virtual appointments and digital monitoring.
Neighbourhood oncology will build on these strong foundations. It will transform our current approach to make neighbourhood and home-based cancer care the default where safe and appropriate.
This includes chemotherapy and other systemic anti-cancer treatments (SACT), assessment and monitoring for complications of cancer or its treatment through ambulatory acute oncology, and support for people living with and beyond cancer (building on our established supportive oncology service and our ongoing plans to develop and promote this model nationally).
Importantly, neighbourhood oncology is not about reducing activity on our Withington site or Christie at centres. Demand for specialist cancer care will continue to grow. Instead, this model helps us meet rising demand safely and sustainably by adopting new service models, supported by digital tools, while improving access by delivering care in the places people live.
We welcome the National Cancer Plan’s adoption of ‘single-queue diagnostics’, an approach pioneered in Greater Manchester using latest digital platforms to identify earliest appointment times across the region for essential diagnostic tests. Single-queue diagnostics has been shown to reduce the time taken to diagnose cancers and start treatment for patients and is currently being rolled out for more tests across Greater Manchester.
The National Cancer Plan also recognises the importance of cutting-edge precision technologies to improve cancer treatments, including expanding the role of stereotactic radiotherapy (SABR) and robotic surgery, and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) to free up ‘time to care’ – all of which have been embedded at The Christie to improve outcomes for our patients for many years.
The publication of the National Cancer Plan reinforces the direction we are already taking. The key commitments, including more personalised support and more consistent access to care, align with our neighbourhood oncology plans and our long-standing commitment to delivering the highest quality care for our patients. Over the coming weeks, we will review the full detail of the plan and consider what it means for our patients, our staff and our role within the wider system.
Above all, our focus will remain on what matters most: delivering the best possible care for our patients, wherever they are and whatever their needs.