Australia and NZ work on smart way to improve management of prostate cancer | afr.com
▻http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/health/mens-health/smart-way-to-improve-management-of-prostate-cancer-20160620-gpnqc5
A bold and ambitious system, designed to ensure men receive optimum treatment for prostate cancer, has just been launched in Australia and New Zealand.
It involves creating an all-encompassing database that combines the objective metrics of men’s cancer with subjective accounts of their experiences with the management of their disease.
Countries commonly have cancer registries which record when a cancer is diagnosed and when the patient dies. What happens “in between” is largely unknown.
This new database will record what happens “in between”, often in men’s own words. It will combine quantity and quality to capture trends and variations in treatment across both countries.
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Unrelated to this, in the early 2000s, Millar and Professor Mark Frydenberg, now president of the Urological Society of Australia and New Zealand, put their heads together to try and determine the patterns of treatment across Victoria.
They looked at all men treated for prostate cancer in one year and saw inexplicable variations in survival.
Why, for example, were men diagnosed in Gippsland twice as likely to die of their disease than their peers in Southern Melbourne? The metrics didn’t explain the difference, nor did they cover side effects the men suffered.