Introduction:
Australia has some of the best cancer outcomes in the world, however receiving optimal cancer care often depends on your background and where you live.
Aim:
Enhancing health systems and networks to deliver optimal cancer care will help address disparities in outcomes experienced by Australians.
Methods:
The Australian Cancer Plan sets the priorities for reform in cancer care for the next decade and beyond. Cancer Australia is leading initiatives to achieve equity in access to optimal care.
Results:
The establishment of the Australian Comprehensive Cancer Network (ACCN) will support connectivity and sharing of expertise between Comprehensive Cancer Centres and other cancer and health services, ensuring patients have access to optimal care.
Optimal Care Pathways (OCPs) set the benchmark for quality cancer care, outlining consistent, safe, high quality, and evidence-based care. The National OCP Framework will support the standardisation and embedding of optimal care.
Delivering optimal cancer care and enabling a high performing cancer control system needs to be built on access, use and sharing of reliable and comprehensive data across all care settings, both public and private. This is critical to informing continuous improvement of cancer care and identifying policy and research priorities across the cancer control continuum.
In partnership with Cancer Council Australia and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Cancer Australia is leading the development of a National Cancer Data Framework and a minimum dataset to improve the accessibility, consistency and comprehensiveness of cancer data. Having better data regarding optimal care delivery will drive service improvement locally and regionally across Australia. Harnessing the collaboration of the ACCN will drive data driven improvements to cancer care.
Conclusion:
This will guide uptake and evaluation of OCPs using the ACCN to embed the utilisation of quality indicators to drive service improvements, consistent with the National Data Framework principles.