Cancer Registrars Week observed
(CNS Local Life): The Health Services Authority (HSA) and the Cayman Islands Cancer Registry are joining communities around the world observing Cancer Registrars Week, 8-12 April, recognising the country’s progress in cancer registration and research. The week promotes how the data cancer registrars collect provide essential information to researchers, healthcare providers and public health officials.
The information is used to better monitor and advance cancer treatments, conduct research and improve cancer-prevention and screening programmes, stated an HSA press release. The 2019 theme, “Cancer Registrars: Capturing the Picture of Cancer”, reflects this role of cancer registrars in preventing, and finding a cure for, cancer.
“Quality cancer data is central to the nation’s fight against cancer, and cancer registrars are the first link in capturing that data,” said the Cayman Islands Cancer Registrar Amanda Nicholson. “The information collected is largely demographic in nature and allows us to see how this disease is impacting our community.”
The Cayman Islands continues to advance towards the development of a more comprehensive cancer registry, the HSA said in the press release. Nicholson noted that data collected in 2018 showed a 20% increase in registration rates compared with the previous year. “For a number of reasons, media exposure being a big one, more people are choosing to participate in the cancer registry. Presently, we have 443 registrants in the CanReg 5 registry, which is the database we use. It was developed by the World Health Organization and is used by registrars all over the world,” she explained.
Nicholson said the five most commonly reported cancers are breast cancer (with infiltrating duct carcinoma being most prevalent), colon cancer, cancers of the blood, prostate cancer and ovarian cancer.
The Cancer Registry has been designed to capture cancer surveillance data on the very diverse and multicultural population of the Cayman Islands, the HSA said. The registry was developed to better understand what cancer trends look like within the Cayman Islands, thereby making it possible to do more in terms of prevention. Presently, there is very little information available regarding cancer statistics in the Cayman Islands.
“We still don’t know how many individuals are diagnosed within our country each year, which types of cancer are most common, or whether our cancer rates are higher or lower than those of other Caribbean countries. The Cayman Islands Cancer Registry hopes to answer these questions,” Nicholson said.
All information included in the registry is confidential and anonymised, meaning names are excluded, before being entered into a database.
Cancer survivors who want to join the cancer registry should call Amanda Nicholson at 244-2560 or email Amanda.nicholson@hsa.ky
Category: Local News, Medical and Health
Okay, where is the data?