Identifying the NHS Trusts within Cancer Alliances

In a previous post, we outlined the different types of NHS trusts that exist in England. Trust type is an indicator of the types and quantity of medicines a trust uses. Another trust characteristic that can determine medicines usage is whether a trust is a member of a Cancer Alliance. Here we explain what Cancer Alliances are, how the NHS trusts they partner with can be identified, and why this is useful when analysing secondary care medicines usage data.

What are Cancer Alliances?

Cancer Alliances are NHS partnerships that bring together NHS trusts and other health and social care organisations within a region. They were established to improve cancer care by coordinating efforts to improve care pathways, reduce wait times, diagnose cancer sooner, improve patient experience and reduce inequalities in cancer care. There are 20 Cancer Alliances in England.

Identifying the members of a Cancer Alliance

Cancer Alliances were given Organisation Data Service (ODS) codes by the Organisation Data Service. But these codes do not have relationships to other organisations (here is an example on the ODS Data Search and Export tool), which we’ve previously used to identify the ICB and NHS region an NHS trust is associated with.

The geographical boundaries of Cancer Alliances are closely aligned with one or more ICB boundaries. The Office for National Statistics provides a map with the boundaries for each Cancer Alliance. Potential members of each Cancer Alliance could be identified by finding organisations that are located within these boundaries, however, not all organisations within the geographical regions partner with the Cancer Alliance (such as some community and ambulance trusts), and there are a small number of organisations that partner with a Cancer Alliance, but are located outside its geographical location.

There is no single source of the organisations each Cancer Alliance partners with, but most Cancer Alliances indicate this on their websites (which you can find here). Some of the listed partners are trusts that have merged or been succeeded and a small number of trusts partner with multiple Cancer Alliances. We have manually created a mapping of NHS Trust to Cancer Alliance for use on OpenPrescribing Hospitals, which handles these organisational changes and assigns trusts that partner with multiple Cancer Alliances to a single Cancer Alliance based on geographical proximity. This is available as a csv file here.

Why is this useful?

Cancer Alliances coordinate cancer services across NHS trusts and other organisations. Being able to identify the trusts that partner with a Cancer Alliance allows you to look beyond trust-level variation to:

• Check if Cancer Alliance’s treatment pathways and policies for medicines are being followed
• Check whether access to cancer medicines is consistent across the population served by a Cancer Alliance
• Understand how cancer care is organised across a Cancer Alliance
• Identify and target areas for improvement. Should improvement work target a single trust or entire Cancer Alliance?

Identify Cancer Alliances on OpenPrescribing Hospitals

You can see all of the trusts that partner with each Cancer Alliance using the organisation filter on the Submission History feature on OpenPrescribing Hospitals. We plan to incorporate this into the Measures and Analyse features soon. If you have any thoughts on how we have identified the trusts within a Cancer Alliance, or how we can make best use of this information on OpenPrescribing Hospitals, please let us know!