Northern Ireland Cancer Registry

Macmillan-Northern Ireland Cancer Registry partnership

The Northern Ireland Cancer Registry (NICR), with oversight from Queen’s University Belfast and funding from the Public Health Agency, is responsible for producing official cancer statistics for Northern Ireland. NICR collates and analyses information on cancer and the services patients receive and, based on this, is able to report cancer incidence, prevalence and survival. One of its key outputs is evidence to help inform decision making around cancer services.

Macmillan Cancer Support is working in partnership with NICR to use data to improve the understanding of the impact and costs of cancer and its treatment across the whole of the cancer journey, including the wider community and health and social care services in Northern Ireland. The partnership and its objectives align closely with Macmillan’s established work with the National Cancer Registry Analytical Service (NCRAS) but objectives specific to Northern Ireland will include:

• Drawing data from multiple sources to investigate the consequences of cancer treatment, exploring and testing the prevalence and severity of known consequences
• Profiling Transforming Cancer Follow Up patients by linking them to NICR datasets to determine how well they represent the whole cancer patient population
• Collecting information to report on breast cancer recurrences and to work towards a method for routinely collecting and reporting recurrence data electronically

If you have an interest in finding out more about the work plan or are working in a related area and would like to share your insights, please get in touch with Dr Colm Burns – Macmillan Evidence Officer, Northern Ireland.