Cancer Survival Victoria 2007 launch - Part 1

 

Transcript:

Professor David Hill: Cancer registration is very important for the control of cancer. In major developed countries, when a person gets cancer, that information is registered in a central registry. We've had that system in Victoria since 1982. It's an immensely important tool for controlling cancer because it tells us what the trends are, and her the rates are going up or down in different cancers, across the board and in different places, and so on. It is an important monitoring, evaluation and research tool.

Today we are talking about cancer outcomes. There are various outcomes for cancer. As you would all know it is very difficult for a clinician to pronounce an absolute and certain cure for a person who has been diagnosed with and treated for cancer. We can rarely be completely sure that some time in the future cancer won't recur. And so we use an important index of outcome, which is the survival rate, and the traditional rate we focus most on is the five-year survival rate.

It is clear that after five years of surviving from your cancer, the chance of subsequently dying from the cancer is very much less than in the first five years. So it is not a bad measure - it's not perfect, and it's not a guarantee of permanent cure. But that's what we look at and we want to see whether we are making progress in extending the overall five-year survival rate, see whether it is improving and for which cancers, and so forth.

Our Cancer Epidemiology Centre, which incorporates the Cancer Registry, is a thriving research enterprise, and is an example of how to maximise the value of a registry for very important research which goes well beyond simply monitoring trends. The report (Cancer Survival Victoria 2007) of course provides some answers to very interesting questions.

The report contains good news - things are getting better. It provides data for cancer overall; that's combining all sites. That in itself doesn't make a lot of sense for an individual patient because their prospects are determined by the kind of cancer they have, not the overall rate of course. So it is broken down and the data presented for 34 of the common cancers separately: there is trend data, some regional comparisons, and some benchmarks are provided in the report to allow us to assess how we look as if we are doing compared with other parts of the world. I think we can be proud in Victoria at the performance of our medical system and hospital system in treating cancer, because we do well.

The Cancer Registry pools data - both nationally to assist in interstate and national data collections, and also internationally is an important enterprise. But there are differences and we can't explain them all. Unless and until we enhance the data which is collected into the Cancer Registry, we'll be very limited in our ability to explain those differences. It is absolutely essential that we move towards including in the Cancer Registry the set of variables which are collected on people, the missing variables about treatment, state of disease, and so forth. When we have that information, the Health Minister, the Department of Human Services and all those involved in cancer care will be better able to analyse the problem and reduce systematic solutions to any problems that we think we have.

We can go on improving cancer care and outcomes in Victoria; I am absolutely convinced of that. One of the tools to do that is good data.

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