National Cancer Action Team

International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership

The Department of Health and the National Cancer Action Team established the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership (ICBP) involving 12 jurisdictions in December 2009. Specifically it aims to:

1. Identify specific causes of survival differences across partners with high quality cancer data and generate insights to improve cancer survival outcomes
2. Build an ongoing partnership to enable the partners to track the relative successes of their reform programmes and identify good practices they can learn from each other

The Partnership’s 12 members are: New South Wales (Aus), Victoria (Aus), Sweden, Denmark, Norway, England, Northern Ireland, Wales, Alberta (Canada), British Columbia (Canada), Manitoba (Canada) and Ontario (Canada). They all have high quality cancer registries, covering comprehensive populations and can therefore contribute to the in-depth analysis of causes of survival differences.

The scope of the work focuses on four cancers: breast, lung, colorectal and ovarian cancer. Breast, lung and colorectal cancer were chosen because they contribute a large share of the burden of cancer, and ovarian cancer has been included as an example of a less common cancer with large variations in survival across countries.

The ICBP has 5 modules of work planned to explore the underlying reasons for the delays in diagnosis and treatment and differences in the quality of treatment across the partnership:

• Module 1 will explore the reasons for differences in survival due to late stage diagnosis and access to treatment by comparing routinely available data from cancer registries and clinical databases relating to cancer across the partnership
• Module 2 will explore differences in population awareness and beliefs about cancer
• Module 3 will explore differences in primary care systems, the interface with secondary care, and general practitioner behaviours
• Module 4 will explore relative contributions of different factors  to diagnostic delays
• Module 5 will explore differences in the extent to which differences in application of evidence-based treatments influence (stage adjusted) survival rate differences

The programme management of work this work is provided by CR-UK. 

Module 1 - Research on module 1 was published in The Lancet on 22^nd December 2010 using data on patients diagnosed between 1995 and 2007 in the jurisdictions of the six countries that are part of the ICBP.  The analysis shows that survival rates for the four cancers reviewed – lung, breast, colorectal and ovarian – have continued to improve in all jurisdictions, and the UK has begun to close the gap in some, but not all of these cancers.  For full details see

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)62231-3/fulltext

To find out more about the great progress that is being made in all the modules 1-5 please visit the ICBP webpage at. 

www.icbp.org.uk 

Links for the newsletters in the ICBP are given in the links section at the top of the page

Please contact us for further information