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Secondary Care Diagnostic Interval for patients in England

The National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS) in partnership with Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has, for the first time, produced population-based statistics on the length of Secondary Care Diagnostic Interval (SCDI) for patients in England diagnosed with one of twenty-five cancer sites in 2014-2015.

This interactive tool can be used to explore variation in SCDI interval length by demographic factors and geography, either for all routes to diagnosis combined or individually for the three most common routes to diagnosis: Emergency Presentation, Two Week Wait, and Routine GP referral.


Analysis for all routes
Click here to explore variation in SCDI for each of twenty-five cancer sites by demographic factors and geography.
By route analysis
Click here to explore variation in SCDI for each cancer site and route, by demographic factors and geography.

This website presents the secondary care diagnostic interval (SCDI), in days, for patients diagnosed in England in 2014-2015 recorded as having a relevant first event (or start point) in the 6 months leading up to diagnosis.

The SCDI is defined as the time in days between a patient's first event with secondary care and their diagnosis date. The first event is derived from one of the following event types:

  • referral onto an urgent suspected cancer pathway
  • referral to secondary care appointment
  • secondary care appointment
  • relevant diagnostic test appointment in secondary care
The earliest occurring of these events in the 6 months immediately preceding diagnosis is selected as the first event.

For further information on the SCDI and caveats around the data please refer to the 'Information' tab. The full methodology is described in the standard operating procedure: CAS-SOP: Defining the Secondary Care Diagnostic Interval using AV_Tumour linked data. http://www.ncin.org.uk/about_ncin/scdi

This work has been produced as part of the Cancer Research UK - Public Health England Partnership.
This work was undertaken as part of the CRUK-PHE partnership. Data for this study is based on patient-level information collected by the NHS, as part of the care and support of cancer patients. The data is collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service, which is part of Public Health England.