Prostate Cancer Outcomes Registry

[Paul Edwards]

 

Background

2007 Cancer Australia funded a “Pilot of a population ‐ based prostate cancer clinical registry”.

2009 The Victorian Prostate Cancer Clinical Registry established.

2013. Steps to introduce a national Australian registry.

2014 New Zealand also expressed interest in contributing to this initiative.

2017 Reporting of prospective national registry data from Australia and New Zealand intended to start.

In the meantime, data from two established registries in South Australia and Victoria are providing early output.

Movember has introduced a number of international registry initiatives which either replicate, or draw heavily on, the work of the Victorian Prostate Cancer Clinical Registry.

 

What are the benefits of a Registry of Clinical Outcomes?

 

Men are able to make better informed decisions about treatment options by having accurate information available to them about the outcome of different treatments.

 

Feedback to specialists and hospitals on their performance leads to quality improvements. The feedback enables them to compare their results with other providers and stimulates “competition” to improve outcomes.

 

Some ways that the data from the Registry has been used in Victoria

 

Data from the Victorian Prostate Cancer Clinical Registry showed that men diagnosed with prostate cancer in Gippsland (a country region of Victoria) had a poorer 5-year survival rate than the rest of Victoria.  This has resulted in research to identify the factors responsible for this poorer outcome and the development of strategies to remedy the problems identified.

 

In some cases individual specialists have been counseled where their treatment outcomes were significantly inferior to those of their peers.

 

About the Registries

 

Click here to read the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Australia Annual Report 2016
and click here to read the Victorian Prostate Cancer Registry Five Year Report. 

 

Thanks to our committee member Tony Maxwell for drawing our attention to the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Australia Annual Report 2016.  Tony is on the Steering Committee of the NSW Prostate Clinical Cancer Registry (the NSW arm of the Prostate Cancer Outcomes Registry Australia and New Zealand).