Published on 28 May 2026
People across most parts of Cheshire and Merseyside are benefiting from life-saving lung cancer screening, with new figures showing that 940 people in our population have been diagnosed through the NHS Lung Cancer Screening Programme.
The NHS has announced this week that more than 10,000 people nationwide have now been diagnosed with lung cancer through screening – helping detect the disease earlier, when treatment is more likely to be successful.
The programme, which launched in our region in 2021 under the name of Targeted Lung Health Checks, invites people aged 55 to 74 who currently smoke or have smoked in the past for screening. Those identified as high risk are offered a low-dose CT scan, capable of detecting lung cancer before symptoms develop.
The checks have rolled out across most of Cheshire and Merseyside and are due to reach the final areas in Cheshire next year.
New NHS data shows 10,678 lung cancers have been detected through the programme with around 80% of people diagnosed in Cheshire and Merseyside having cancer found at the early stages of one or two. People diagnosed with lung cancer at the earliest stages are nearly 13 times more likely to survive for five years or more than those whose cancer is caught late.
Since the programme began more than 3.3 million people have been invited by the NHS to have a lung health check – almost 200,000 from Cheshire and Merseyside.
Under the new National Cancer Plan, the Government is aiming for 75% people diagnosed with cancer to survive for five years or more by 2035 and the roll out of lung cancer screening throughout England is a key part of this.
The nationwide rollout of the NHS’s programme by 2030 will lead to over 6 million people across England being invited for a lung health check; with an estimated diagnosis of up to 50,000 cancers.
Professor Peter Johnson, NHS England National Clinical Director for Cancer, said: “Lung cancer checks and scans save lives, so it’s fantastic the NHS has now diagnosed over 10,000 people – the majority at an early stage, when treatment is most effective.
“The Lung Cancer Screening Programme has been designed around where people already are, bringing scanners into their local communities to make it easier for people to get checked. It is great to see the positive public response to this programme, and rolling this out nationwide will help us save even more lives in the future.”
Lung cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in England; and around 26,000 people die from the disease every year. Seven out of 10 cases of lung cancer are caused by smoking, while other causes include passive smoking and exposure to certain gases and chemicals.