Jason Harries, Chief Commercial Officer, Insource
News coverage from the Health Service Journal (HSJ) has highlighted a worrying trend that cancer centres in almost every English region are increasingly freezing recruitment to oncology posts.
More than half of cancer centres surveyed reported a recruitment freeze in 2025, compared with fewer than one in four the year before. Meanwhile, national cancer performance has barely moved. At the end of 2025–26, just 70% of patients began first treatment within 62 days, well below the 85% target.
Cancer services are already operating in an environment of rising demand, finite diagnostic and treatment capacity, and intense pressure on clinical and operational teams. Freezing recruitment risks adding another layer of constraint at precisely the point when services need to move faster.
But the staffing gap is not the whole diagnosis.
A workforce challenge and a pathway challenge
More cancer staff are undoubtedly needed. Radiologists, oncologists, cancer trackers, diagnostic teams and administrators all play a critical role in keeping patients moving from referral to diagnosis and treatment.
However, it would be too simplistic to assume that every delay is caused by a vacant post.
In many cases, the issue is the cancer pathway process itself: fragmented information, manual tracking, retrospective reporting, unclear ownership of actions, and limited visibility of what needs to happen next for each patient.
When teams are working from static reports or separate trackers, they may be able to see that a patient has waited too long. What they cannot always see quickly enough is why, what should happen next, who owns the action, and where an intervention will have the greatest impact.
The question is not only: “Do we have enough staff?”
It is also: “Are we using staff and our pathway capacity as effectively as possible?”
Full visibility changes the operational conversation
This is where Patient Pathway Plus – Cancer Pathway Management (PP+ CPM) can make a tangible difference, providing faster care and improved patient outcomes.
PP+ CPM gives cancer teams full visibility of pathways in real time, from referral through to the day of treatment. It brings together data from multiple sources, including EPR, pathology and radiology systems, to create a unified and auditable view of each patient journey.
Rather than relying on separate systems and static snapshots, teams can work from a live operational picture of the pathway.
This enables staff to:
- Identify patients at risk of breaching cancer waiting-time standards or missing intermediate milestones.
- See the planned next event for each patient and act before delays happen.
- Create dynamic worklists based on cancer type, referral date, days elapsed, diagnosis status, decision-to-treat date and other relevant pathway measures.
- Make actions, ownership and work in progress visible across teams, reducing duplication of effort.
- Use configurable alerts and escalation workflows to ensure that high-risk patients are not missed.
- Track patients across care settings, hospital sites and hub/spoke services.
- Automate reporting, freeing staff from repetitive manual data collation.
Evidence that visibility can support improvement
At NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, PP+ CPM was introduced to provide a single operational view of cancer pathways and support proactive management of patients at risk.
After implementation, the number of ongoing diagnosed cancer waits of more than 100 days began to fall. Over the following four weeks, those long waits reduced by 42%.
The improvement came from giving teams the information they needed to identify risk earlier, prioritise the right patients and take action before delays escalated.
The pathway cannot be allowed to freeze
Recruitment freezes are a warning sign, they underline the pressure facing cancer services and the need for sustained investment in the workforce. But while workforce capacity remains constrained, NHS organisations must also examine how well their cancer pathways are being managed.
Cancer pathways cannot wait for the perfect staffing model. They need to be actively managed today, using trusted, unified data and full visibility of the patient journey.
PP+ CPM helps organisations do exactly that: streamline cancer pathways, reduce unnecessary operational burden and give teams the real-time insight needed to keep patients moving towards diagnosis and treatment.
Get in touch to find out how PP+ CPM can support improved, proactive cancer pathway management in your NHS Trust.
