Today's announcement by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care is wonderful news.
Tenovus Cancer Care has been at the forefront of advocating for the implementation of a targeted lung cancer screening programme, particularly since the UK Lung Screening Committee made its official recommendation for each UK nation to implement a lung screening programme back in June 2022.
The impact of introducing this targeted initiative will be significant and the sooner this programme is fully rolled out across Wales at pace to ensure we meet the 2027 timetable, the sooner more lives will be saved. It will have a transformative impact on both the number of deaths from lung cancer, the biggest cause of death from cancer in Wales, and on cancer inequalities, given that people from the more deprived areas of Wales are nearly three times as likely to develop lung cancer, and to experience poorer outcomes.
We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr Sinan Eccles and his colleagues for their tireless efforts and dogged determination to ensuring that the people of Wales are given equitable access to lung screening. It has been a pleasure to work with such dedicated professionals to get to this point.
We look forward to hearing about the next steps and how we can support colleagues in the NHS to deliver this programme at pace, so that more people have their cancers detected at an early stage, and go on to live healthy and productive lives as a result.
