The Cancer Reform Strategy (CRS) has laid out the direction of travel for cancer information and the requirement for this information to be transferred electronically to local cancer registries by provider organisations.
Cancer Registries have been granted the authority to collect information about patients and their tumours through the National Information Governance Board (NIGB) acting under Section 158 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (which superseded the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG) under Secton 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001).
In 2008 the variation document to the NHS Contract was issued that mandated Trusts to collect and send electronically every month data from hospital patient administration systems (PAS), Pathology (PATH) and Multi-disciplinary Teams (MDT’s) on every patient diagnosed with a tumour to their local Cancer Registry. This has now been imbedded into the NHS contract and Review of Central Returns (ROCR) have issued a licence (licence number: ROCR/OR/0220/FT) for all Trusts to provide all the data items within the National Cancer Registration Dataset from 1st April 2009 and by 31st March 2011 (within 15 Operational Days of the end of the month).
By the end of March 2011 all Providers had to ensure the full Cancer Registration Dataset is provided in an electronic format to their local Cancer Registry, this may be via the submission of multiple data extracts which will make up the full dataset e.g. Cancer Waiting Times, Radiotherapy Dataset, PAS, Pathology, local datasets etc.
Statutory Instrument 2002 No.1438
* The National Information Governance Board for Health and Social Care (NIGB) has replaced the Patient Information Advisory Group (PIAG). PIAG was replaced under Section 158 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 and was formally wound up on 31 December 2008. Responsibility for administering Section 251 powers transferred to the National Information Governance Board on 1 January 2009: http://www.dh.gov.uk/ab/PIAG/index.htm
