The National Lung Cancer Audit (NLCA) evaluates how the care received by people diagnosed with lung cancer in England and Wales compares with recommended practice and provides information that supports healthcare providers, commissioners, and regulators to improve the care for patients. The NLCA reports a set of process and outcome measures that cover important aspects of the care pathway for people diagnosed with lung cancer.
In the NLCA State of the Nation report 2024, we give an overview of the patterns of care and outcomes for 36,886 people diagnosed with lung cancer in England in 2022. A separate section provides describes results for 2,211 people diagnosed in Wales in 2022.
The report describes summarises the performance of lung cancer services in 2022 and compares this to the situation in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
A Methodology Supplement provides further information on the NLCA performance indicators.
Version 2: May 2024
This version of the report includes the correction of typographical errors in the infographics on page 5, figures 2 and 3 on pages 7 and 12 and the final paragraph of the commentary on page 14.
NLCA State of the Nation 2024 Change Log (14kB xlsx)
Dashboard and Data Tables
The results for individual NHS providers in England and Wales can be accessed via an interactive web-based dashboard or downloaded as an Excel file of data tables.
The dashboard provides information from the State of the Nation Report for people diagnosed in England in 2022 as well as information on trends over time, breaking down the information into quarterly figures over a three-year period.
The data tables for the information in the State of the Nation Report provide detailed results on the care received by people diagnosed in England and Wales in 2022.
We have released a revised data tables file (published on 6th June 2024). If you downloaded a version of this spreadsheet before this date, please delete your saved copy and replace it with version v3. The earlier version of the data tables contained an error which occurred when the provider level results were compiled from the output of our statistical software. The error resulted in performance indicator values being allocated to the wrong NHS trust in a number of cases. The performance indicator results published on the online dashboard were not affected by the error.
Data source used in the State of the Nation report:
For people diagnosed in England, the datasets used to produce the information in the report are collated by the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS). For people diagnosed in Wales, the NLCA dataset is captured through a national system, Cancer Information System for Wales (CaNISC).
The NLCA use data for English NHS trusts from the Rapid Cancer Registration Dataset (RCRD). This dataset is made available more quickly than the complete cancer registration dataset, but the speed of production means it does not have complete coverage of all people diagnosed with lung cancer in England during the reporting period. For more information regarding the RCRD, please visit digital NHS.
The report allocates patients to English NHS organisations based on the “trust at diagnosis”. The allocation of patients to NHS trusts is based on the best information available when the RCRD is produced; this can result in some misallocation of patients, particularly to tertiary centres which do not typically diagnose large numbers of people with lung cancer.