Dear all,
Professor Michel Coleman will be giving a talk to the RSS Manchester
local group on at 5:00 on Wednesday March 6th. Tea and biscuits start
at 4:30. The meeting will be in Room E32, John Dalton Building,
Manchester Metropolitan University.
The title and abstract follow.
Estimating cancer survival in populations -
and public health applications
Randomised controlled trials measure the highest achievable survival,
while population studies estimate the average survival actually
achieved. This simple dichotomy has major implications for both the
data and the methodology required to estimate cancer survival. It also
affects the interpretation of survival estimates for public health and
policy-making, their applicability to recent or current clinical
practice, and the feasibility of examining long-term survival.
Population-based survival estimates for cancer comprise one of the
essential tools for monitoring the efficacy and equity of a national
cancer treatment programme. The use of crude, net and relative
survival estimates will be discussed in the context of their use as
health service performance indicators, as well as for the study of
cancer survival trends, socio-economic and geographic inequalities in
survival, the proportion of patients who can be said to have been
cured, and the number of deaths that would be avoidable if
socio-economic inequalities in survival were eliminated. The public
health and policy applications of cancer survival data will be
illustrated with results from cancer survival studies in England and
Wales, Scotland, Europe and the USA.
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