The survey of patients at 155 NHS trusts also asked patients how they ranked the care they received, with 31 trusts receiving worse scores than last year.
Another 31 trusts had made significant progress since last year, 40 had made smaller improvements and there was little change at a further 50 trusts, the report found.
Overall 88 per cent of patients ranked their care as either "good" or "excellent" in the survey which was carried out late last year.
Sean Duffy, NHS England national clinical director for cancer, said he was "disappointed" that scores had dropped at 31 trusts, claiming the decline had been "marginal" but there was "more work to do".
He added: "Whilst the results of this survey are very encouraging, every patient deserves the best experience they can have of care and that is what we shall be working on for the future.
"I am heartened to see that so many patients had a good experience of their care."
Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, said the results were "positive" but added that it was "strange" some trusts should fail to make progress or even provide worse care when others were able to improve.
"Macmillan's analysis shows that the treatment of hospital staff is intrinsically linked to this. Happy staff means happy patients," he said.
"Conversely, where staff suffer high levels of discrimination or harassment, cancer patients are up to 18 times more likely to receive poor care. That is really worrying, and comes down to leadership."
Mark Flannagan, chief executive of Beating Bowel Cancer, said: "It's disappointing to see that, for bowel cancer patients seeing a GP, almost a third of them had to visit the GP more than twice before being referred to hospital.
"We're concerned that this figure hasn't improved since last year and we need to understand why. Bowel cancer is very treatable if caught early, so we'd like to see incentives for GPs for early diagnosis and penalties for late diagnosis."
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568612/s/3098d1b5/sc/8/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Chealth0Chealthnews0C10A2764690CTens0Eof0Ethousands0Eof0Ecancer0Epatients0Evisiting0EGP0Emultiple0Etimes0Ebefore0Ereferral0Bhtml/story01.htm