Clinical Input to the NCIN

Getting clinical input into and engagement with the NCIN is a high priority and the establishment of 12 NCIN Site- Specific Clinical Reference Groups (SSCRGs) was covered in the first edition of the newsletter. The membership of the groups - at least for the first year - is now established and all but one of them had their first meetings by the time of the NCIN conference on 25th June 2009. They have begun to identify the work plan appropriate to their own speciality areas and are currently putting together bids for how the additional funds identified by the NCIN for site-specific work should be used. One of the initial tasks was to look at what can be gained from analysis of the HES/Cancer Registry data linkage which was completed late in 2008. Many groups have found this linkage a very fruitful source of data and several posters presented at the NCIN conference demonstrate the value of this work.

One of the pressing priorities is providing clinical advice into the development of the new National Cancer Dataset (and within it the National Chemotherapy dataset). The timescale for this project, as set by the NHS Information Centre, is tight but is central to how we collect data in the future. One important element is the difficult area of how to record co-morbidity in a clinically relevant way - a problem that will be well known to any one who has tried to produce case-mix adjusted reports from large scale comparative data. To this end NCIN held a co-morbidity workshop on Thursday 22nd October to try and reach some sort of consensus on the issue.

We will also be looking at how access to the GP Research Database and radiotherapy data can enrich what is available for analysis and are keen to do some pilot work with sites with good chemotherapy e-prescribing systems to see how to best incorporate more detailed chemotherapy data in the future.