Rapid Cancer Registration Data set (RCRD)

About RCRD

The Rapid Cancer Registration Data contains proxy tumour registrations and some associated events on the cancer patient pathway (e.g. surgery, radiotherapy and systemic anti-cancer therapy data) from January 2018 to the most recently available data on cancer diagnoses. RCRD provides a quicker, indicative source of cancer data compared to the National Cancer Registration Data (NCRD), which is the 'gold-standard' registration data set and which relies on additional data sources, enhanced follow-up with trusts and expert processing by cancer registration officers. Due to the lower quality of RCRD, the data will not match the eventual National Statistics published on the full NCRD.

A webinar on RCRD, exploring its purpose, structure, and data quality overview, is available on the our YouTube channel.

Data access

The Rapid Cancer Registration Data is available in the NDRS Cancer Consolidated Data Set product through the Data Access Request Service.

The access to data page of this website has more information on what can be requested and how to make a request.

Data quality reports

The team produces a monthly data quality report, which provides a full explanation of the creation methodology and data quality caveats (due to the rapid automated creation process without additional data curation) behind this data set.

These can be downloaded from the Resources section of this page.

Using RCRD to measure stage

NCRD attempts to stage all stageable cancers (some cancer types do not have a specific staging system that allows their stage to be classified). However, in the RCRD data, stage information is only available for 13 specific cancers, which represent approximately three quarters of all malignant cancers (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer). Details of these sites and how they compare to similar sites from in the NCRD can be found in the monthly data quality reports, which are available from the Resources section of this page. RCRD does not attempt to derive a stage for other cancer sites for several reasons, including complex and/or multiple relevant staging systems, for example which may require more detailed ICD-10 coding than is possible with RCRD, or poor stage completeness in NCRD.

The team have also created guidance on using the RCRD to measure progress against the 75% staging ambition.

RCRD incidence and treatment dashboard

The National Disease Registration Service provides regular releases of the Rapid Cancer Registration Data (RCRD) in the RCRD incidence and treatment dashboards. These dashboards provide monthly estimates of the number of diagnoses of cancer, the volume of surgical tumour resection procedures undertaken and the proportion of patients receiving a surgical tumour resection, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, at England level. The data is broken down by cancer group and patient or tumour factors: age, gender, deprivation, ethnicity, Route to Diagnosis, stage at diagnosis or cancer alliance.

To find out more, select from the links or open the dashboard below:

publicly via CancerData (Note: this may take a few minutes to initially load) - this version also provides data broken down by integrated care board (ICB).
secure access via CancerStats2 (opens in a new window) - this version also provides data broken down by trust at diagnosis. Please note that this platform requires an N3/HSCN secure network connection. To ensure the best user experience, we encourage the use of modern web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge to access the platform. A small number of platform users have reported issues when opening reports using Internet Explorer.