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Find out more about our trial of a new way to offer information about cancer treatment in hospitals across England. This tool aims to help people make decisions about where to have their treatment.
More people are now being given the option to choose where to have treatment. We want to support this choice by giving information about cancer services in England. There is already a lot of information about hospitals and the services they provide, but it’s not always published in a way that is easy to understand and useful.
We have taken information from peer review assessments, patient experience surveys and other sources and presented it in a way that we hope will be more meaningful. People can use this information to learn more about a single hospital, or to compare hospitals if they are choosing between them.
To chose which data to use we spoke to people affected by cancer and collaborated with the National Cancer Intelligence Network|. We recognise the quality of routinely captured data may be variable in places. Therefore we have used data from the NCIN service profiles, which have been out for consultation with the relevant trusts. There is also an argument that quality of services will never improve until the data are used.
The information we present is not intended as a substitute for advice from a healthcare professional, and we are not making judgements about services in hospitals. The ratings we give are from the sources we use, and are not the opinion of Macmillan Cancer Support. You can find out more about where this information comes from|.
On the Choosing your treatment and care homepage| there is a search box for you to enter your postcode, town, or the name of a hospital near you. This search will bring up a list of hospitals near you that provide treatment for colon and rectal cancers. You can select to see information about a single hospital or compare up to three. If you start with fewer than three you can add others for comparison later on.
We have used a combination of simple statements and symbols to summarise the data we are using. On every section there is the option to find out more about what the information means, and where it comes from. Where relevant, we will also highlight areas where a service falls into the bottom 20% of hospitals in performance against specific criteria. We would suggest that the person might wish to speak to their healthcare professional about these areas.
The pages in this section link to a short evaluation survey|. Your feedback is very important to help us understand whether this information is useful. For the trial period, we are focusing on colon and rectal cancer services in England. Based on evaluations, we might develop information for other cancer types and services in the other UK nations. So it is very important that we learn as much as we can from this first trial.
For answers, support or just a chat, call the Macmillan Support Line free (Monday to Friday, 9am-8pm)
If you have any questions about cancer, need support or just want someone to talk to, ask Macmillan.