Staging completeness dashboard

This dashboard presents the completeness of cancer staging data for diagnoses at NHS Trusts in England.

The dashboard shows the proportion of ‘stageable’ cancers, diagnosed and discussed at multi-disciplinary team meetings (MDT’s) at NHS Trusts, that are subsequently reported with a full stage. This data is presented by different health geographies, including by NHS Trust, for 17 cancer groups. The data covers cancer diagnoses in quarterly intervals since January (Q1) 2021 and is updated monthly.

The information presented in this dashboard is derived from cancer data submitted to the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) and is reported here for transparency reasons to monitor and support data improvement work. This data is not indicative of quality of clinical care, routes to diagnosis, treatments or the outcomes of those treatments for patients in any cancer group, geography or NHS Trust shown.

Where data is presented by health geographies, these are based on that NHS Trust’s membership of a specific health geography. Many NHS Trusts will typically discuss, diagnose or treat patients who live outside of that Trust’s assigned geography. This means that the data presented here should not be used to infer cancer incidence by any geographical boundary.

Acknowledgement

This work uses data that has been provided by patients and collected by the NHS as part of their care and support. The data is collated, maintained and quality assured by the National Disease Registration Service, which is part of NHS England.

Early stage at diagnosis is one of the most important factors affecting cancer outcomes and promoting earlier stage at diagnosis is one of the key aims of the NHS Long Term Plan. Measuring and monitoring national staging data is crucial to understand variation and deliver evidence-based decisions.

To support this aim, NHS England is aiming for NHS Trusts to report cancer stage for 80% of all stageable cancers at diagnosis. The National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) are launching the Cancer Staging Completeness Dashboard that will provide information on the completeness of this data.

Below is a recording of Professor Peter Johnson, National Clinical Director for Cancer for NHS England, explaining the importance of staging data:

The information in the Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD) supports national cancer registration and associated analysis (at local, regional, national, and international level) in addition to other national cancer audit programmes. Providers of cancer services within the NHS in England have been required to provide a monthly return for all cancer patients diagnosed from 1 January 2013 using this data set.

The completeness dashboard reports completeness of cases discussed at MDT and reported with a full stage by health geography, NHS Trust, 17 cancer groups and dates of diagnosis by quarter. All NHS Trusts in England who hold MDT meetings and report cancer stage are included in this dashboard.

The stage of a cancer is a description of how far the cancer has spread. The Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) TNM stage is the most widely used system for staging cancers although there are several other classification systems in use depending on the type of cancer.

The aggregate dataset does not include the ICD10 code, staging classification or stage grouping used but reports on the presence of a valid stage / grouping by broad cancer group in the COSD submission from the NHS Trust.

Please refer to the 'data and definitions' section of the dashboard for a list of stageable cancers and data items included. 

Data updates are made each month using aggregated COSD data from the NDRS Cancer Analysis System (CAS). Release numbers are incremental indicating the data update year (since 2023) and the data update month (for example, 1.10 indicates a data refresh for October 2023). 

Please refer to the 'updates and user feedback' section of the dashboard for more details. 

The NDRS Business intelligence team very much welcome your feedback on this new dashboard. Your comments will inform functionality and features of subsequent releases of this dashboard and help shape the roadmap for future development. Please direct any comments or enquires to: [email protected]

The Data Liaison team within the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) has a wealth of knowledge on cancer pathways and processes within NHS Trusts. NHS teams submitting data to NDRS can seek advice, support, and find out more about the data improvement initiatives available to them directly from the regional Data Liaison Managers.

If you have queries relating to COSD please view the dataset pages on this website or contact the COSD helpdesk at [email protected]