Now is the time for action on ovarian cancer
(Thanumporn Thongkongkaew / Alamy)
3 min read
The challenges of ovarian cancer embody the challenges that we face in women’s health. As we await the National Cancer Strategy, and with a renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England recently announced, we shouldn’t accept ovarian cancer outcomes in the UK continuing to lag compared to other countries.
Of all the cancers that affect women, ovarian cancer is arguably the most challenging and pressing. Sadly, more women die because of ovarian cancer in the UK – roughly 11 women per day – than all the other gynaecological cancers combined.
I was disappointed to also learn that international benchmarks show substantially lower survival for women in the UK compared to countries like Norway or Canada.
The reasons for this are well known. Two thirds of women are diagnosed late, with over a quarter diagnosed in A&E. At this late stage, ovarian cancer is much harder to treat.
In the latest National Ovarian Cancer Audit report, of those diagnosed in A&E, a third did not receive any treatment within three months of diagnosis. It is not hard to imagine how distressing the delays and uncertainty must be for women in this situation.
I have been co-chair and chair of the APPG on Women’s Health since 2022 and in that time I have heard countless stories from women who have struggled to receive information, diagnosis and support for their health concerns. The pattern is clear: women’s pain is normalised, their symptoms are dismissed too easily, and they are not listened to.
Far from being a single disease, ovarian cancer can be described as a set of complex, often personal, diseases
Whilst I do believe that the challenges we see in ovarian cancer reflect the challenges we know about more broadly across women’s health, I would go even further.
Far from being a single disease, ovarian cancer can be described as a set of complex, often personal, diseases. The condition is not widely understood, shown by the fact that just one in five women can name bloating as a main symptom and almost half of GPs believe mistakenly that symptoms only present in the disease’s later stages. Given this complexity, it is unsurprising that diagnosis and treatment often come too late. I would go as far as to say that the challenges we see across women’s health exacerbate the poor outcomes we observe in ovarian cancer. We cannot truly make progress in ovarian cancer until we solve the broader challenges in women’s health.
Thankfully, we await a new National Cancer Plan, and I was pleased to see the recent news that the Women’s Health Strategy will be renewed. The government is taking these policy challenges seriously and I hope that these important initiatives will aim to improve outcomes in ovarian cancer as well as all cancers that affect women.
My asks to the government on these issues are simple. Change the mindset around women’s health, look at how to diagnose earlier, and ensure treatment pathways are timely and reflect the nature of the patient’s particular disease.
The National Ovarian Cancer Audit provides a wealth of insights into the current landscape in ovarian cancer across the NHS. At the same time, there is an impassioned and active policy community of patient groups and clinical leaders in ovarian cancer who have developed detailed and incremental policy improvements. The government should listen to them and co-develop specific national targets that both the National Cancer Plan and renewed Women’s Health Strategy can deliver against.
If a woman is diagnosed with ovarian cancer at an early stage, statistics show she is 90 per cent likely to survive. This is the beacon of optimism that we must follow. It is possible to turn this around and improve outcomes in ovarian cancer. Now is the time to turn it into action.
Gill Furniss is the Labour MP for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, and chair of the APPG on Women's Health
