NCRI 2015

UK National Cancer Audit should be every year

Prof Greg Rubin - Durham University, Durham, UK

The first National Cancer Audit was undertaken in 2009/10; it was done entirely in primary care at that time and was published in 2012 and a lot of papers have been published since based on its findings. So it was very innovative and laid the ground for the upcoming now called National Cancer Diagnosis Audit. It will still predominantly be based in primary care but we are hoping to incorporate it much better within the National Cancer Registration Service. At the moment we’re working with, by we I mean the Royal College of GPs, is working with Cancer Research UK, with Macmillan and with the National Cancer Intelligence Network to formulate a strategy for doing this audit and, indeed, for making it an audit that is repeated on an annual basis. That’s important, that we’re not looking to do a one-off audit but to make it part of a cycle of audits.

So this will be more frequent and you hope it will influence policy?

I’m hopeful and expectant that it will be a regular audit. It will focus on different aspects of cancer diagnosis year by year but there’s no doubt that what we found in the first audit has influenced policy and I’m hopeful that this forthcoming audit will continue that process and enable policy to be fine-tuned, according to its findings.