Availability of stage at diagnosis, cancer treatment delay and compliance with cancer guidelines as cancer registry indicators for cancer care in Europe: Results of EUROCHIP‐3 survey

EUROCHIP (European Cancer Health Indicators Project) focuses on understanding inequalities in the cancer burden, care and survival by the indicators “stage at diagnosis,” “cancer treatment delay” and “compliance with cancer guidelines” as the most important indicators. Our study aims at providing insight in whether cancer registries collect well‐defined variables to determine these indicators in a comparative way. Eighty‐six general European population‐based cancer registries (PBCR) from 32 countries responded to the questionnaire, which was developed by EUROCHIP in collaboration with ENCR (European Network of Cancer Registries) and EUROCOURSE. Only 15% of all the PBCR in EU had all three indicators available. The indicator “stage at diagnosis” was gathered for at least one cancer site by 81% (using TNM in 39%). Variables for the indicator “cancer treatment delay” were collected by 37%. Availability of type of treatment (30%), surgery date (36%), starting date of radiotherapy (26%) and starting date of chemotherapy (23%) resulted in 15% of the PBCRs to be able to gather the indicator “compliance to guidelines”. Lack of data source access and qualified staff were the major reasons for not collecting all the variables. In conclusion, based on self‐reporting, a few of the participating PBCRs had data available which could be used for clinical audits, evaluation of cancer care projects, survival and for monitoring national cancer control strategies. Extra efforts should be made to improve this very efficient tool to compare cancer burden and the effects of the national cancer plans over Europe and to learn from each other. What's new? Cancer registries have provided population‐based, comparative cancer‐survival statistics since the 1950′s, and have identified significant differences across Europe. An important question has been: what factors are responsible for these differences? This study, called EUROCHIP‐3, found that only 15% of all population‐based cancer registries actually collect the three most important indicators for determining inequality in cancer care and survival in Europe. The authors recommend that extra resources be made available to improve this very efficient tool for comparing cancer burden and the effects of national cancer plans.