Professor Deirdre Heenan:

If I were putting together the recommendations, the first one would be leadership, so that it is not a system of “that is your responsibility” or “no, that is yours” and the public and everyone else is clear as to who is leading this project. By leadership, I mean a named individual. Our experience is that we are told it is "the department", that big black hole where we cannot find anyone who will actually take ownership of what is going on. With leadership comes accountability. People will buy into something if they see timelines, milestones and the funding and they are able to chart that this is not yet another strategy that gathers dust on the shelf or is abandoned because there is a change of political priority. Leadership is really important. We can look at and learn from somewhere like Denmark, where there is a ten-year plan with cross-party consensus. This will not happen overnight but people will buy into it if they think change will happen and within a given period of time.

The other issue in terms of the strategy is that we really think about data and how we use it. Professor Mark Lawler and I have just published a report on how we use data in cancer care and the importance of using data so that we can have a fully informed cancer strategy. Leadership and data are important, as is that wider view of knowledge sharing so that we learn from international examples. While it is great to have been invited here to discuss it, I would love to see people coming from other countries to say that these are problems that exist across the western world and this is what they did to address them. It gives people hope. Sometimes when we talk about health, people become so despondent that they just hope they do not become sick and that it does not happen to them or their family. That is no way to live, given the amount of money that we spend on this issue. It is about leadership, ambition, accountability and transparency. The members will hate this phrase, but we are all in this together. We are. It affects everyone.