Our work

In July 2010 Cancer Control New Zealand appointed an independent panel of international experts to review the New Zealand Cancer Registry (NZCR).

The review produced 17 recommendations relating to four broad categories:

1. That there should be changes to the governance of NZCR. These changes have already been made, with the establishment of the Cancer Registry Board, which has representatives from Cancer Control New Zealand and the Director-General of Health.

2. That basic clinical data should be collected on all cancer registrations. The essential data currently missing is clinical stage. Without this information, it is impossible to calculate the survival of cohorts of patients, and therefore to measure the impact of screening programmes and new treatments. Survival figures are also required for international benchmarking, so we can see how New Zealand is performing in comparison with the rest of the world.

3. That pathological data should be reported to the Cancer Registry in synoptic format. The Cancer Registry Act 1993, which mandated that a copy of all pathology reports containing a cancer diagnosis should be forwarded to the Registry, was an enormous step forward. Now we are saying that pathology reports should be in the form of a list which includes all the important parameters for that particular cancer, including relevant biomarkers. This type of reporting is already supported by the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, which is systematically developing synoptic reporting models for all cancers. The Cancer Registry will use the ones that are already available, and will adopt others as they are released.

4. That data held on the Registry should be much more accessible to medical practitioners and health planners. The aim is that we should have an online Cancer Registry similar to the one in New South Wales by the middle of 2012. This will allow clinicians to easily view data on their own patients, and to find out the baseline data on individual cancers which is an essential requirement for designing research studies. Health planners will be able to view contemporary data on cancer demographics in New Zealand, so effort and expenditure can be focussed on the areas of greatest need.

The upgrade of the Cancer Registry is a separate project to the Ministry's National Cancer Information Project, but the two projects are highly complementary. Eventually it is hoped that most, if not all, of the clinical data required by the Registry and other cancer information related systems will be routinely collected by Public and Private Hospitals as a result of the National Cancer Information Project, and then automatically passed on electronically. Until this situation has been reached, some of the clinical data required will need to be collected from the clinicians involved in providing care for cancer patients.