Sioned Williams asks how government can ensure that there’s enough support for people with secondary breast cancer in Wales, when they don’t know who has it
This article was published in the Health pages of the Western Mail on Monday 14 April 2025.
Lack of breast cancer data is failing people in Wales
Many readers will remember the late Tassia Haines. She was a constituent of mine from Port Talbot who died far too young from secondary breast cancer just over a year ago. I had the privilege of meeting her in 2023. No-one meeting her could fail to be impressed by her campaigning on this issue.
She made the news because her Senedd petition calling for better support for people living with metastatic breast cancer was signed by over 14,000 people, and her campaigning was part of the reason three further secondary breast care nurses were recruited (to add to the existing one – ONE! – for the whole of Wales). That’s impressive enough.
But for many, what made the biggest impression was Tassia’s blog and Instagram posts which gave them something they weren’t getting elsewhere – information. Tassia understood the issues caused by primary breast cancer patients not being made aware of secondary, or metastatic breast cancer, and the ‘red flag’ symptoms that were being missed as a result.
The reason this is so important is because secondary breast cancer – that is, cancer that started in the breast but has spread to another part of the body – cannot be cured. One in three people that have breast cancer will go on to get secondary, incurable breast cancer. Through her blog, Tassia aimed to tell the truth about living with incurable breast cancer, because she felt that there was a lack of transparency about it which led to insufficient and patchy support for patients.
She also understood the significance of the lack of data on how many people living in Wales had secondary breast cancer. If you don’t know how many people have it, then how can ensure that there is enough support for them?
As Tassia told Wales Online in an interview in 2021: “Without the data, we can’t call for more life-saving clinical trials or make a case for secondary breast cancer specialist nurses which would greatly improve patient care.”
I took part in the Senedd debate about her petition in 2022, and the Senedd marked her sad passing in 2024.
I raised Tassia’s case again just last month with the First Minister, to ask what steps the Welsh Government has taken to ensure that health boards collect this crucial breast cancer data because we still don’t have a comprehensive picture of primary and secondary breast cancer in Wales due to incomplete data. I also pushed the First Minister for an answer for when Wales will start providing data to an audit quarterly data dashboard, so that patients can know the state of breast cancer services in their region. I’m glad the First Minister responded by recognising more work needed to be done on this and said she would raise this with the Health Secretary.
It's by understanding the scale of inconsistencies between health boards that the work can begin to ensure patients are treated equally, and it’s by understanding how many patients are at this difficult stage of their life that the right support can be put in place to help them to live as well as possible.