Introduction

The Ovarian Cancer Audit Feasibility Pilot is a collaboration between the gynaecological oncology clinical community, the charity sector and Public Health England to perform meaningful analysis of routinely collected data for the purposes of improving treatment and outcomes for women diagnosed with ovarian cancer in England. The Ovarian Cancer Audit Feasibility Pilot is jointly funded by the British Gynaecological Cancer Society, Target Ovarian Cancer and Ovarian Cancer Action and is being delivered by analysts at the National Cancer Registration and Analysis Service (NCRAS), part of Public Health England. The pilot will run for 2 years and will publish a range of data outputs on ovarian cancer throughout that time, including a final report on the audit and its findings, bringing all the analysis into one place.

Find out more about the outputs from the audit on the OCAFP web page. 

This document constitutes the first report of a series of analyses throughout the 2-year project. It provides a detailed insight into the status of this disease in England at the commencement of the project, including details of disease incidence, mortality and survival. In keeping with international ovarian cancer analyses, we have included cases of ovary, fallopian tube and primary peritoneal carcinomas within our definition of “ovarian cancer” in these analyses, and for the survival statistics we have excluded ovarian tumours of borderline malignant potential. We have also provided survival statistics with borderline tumours included for historical comparison purposes.

The analyses are achieved by linking databases which capture clinical data on cancer and its treatment in routine day-to-day practice in NHS hospitals in England. The Cancer Outcomes and Services Dataset (COSD) captures details of every cancer diagnosed in NHS organisations, including pathology details and a set of important clinical parameters such as disease stage and WHO performance status. Details of chemotherapy treatments are captured in the Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) dataset, and extensive data relating to hospital treatments including surgical procedures and patient comorbidities can be derived from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) datasets. The Cancer Waiting Times (CWT) data set captures details of the pathways leading to the diagnosis of cancers in England, and Office for National Statistics data enables insight into the deaths of cancer patients, either from cancer or other causes.

The analysts in the NCRAS, in collaboration with representatives of the 3 funding charities, have identified cases of ovary, fallopian tube and primary peritoneal carcinomas and by linkage to these additional datasets have produced the following analyses to profile the disease in England. This is a new, streamlined approach to clinical audit. Rather than collect fresh information, it uses data already collected by medical teams and engages with clinicians through existing clinical networks. The quality and subsequent success of the project is therefore dependent on the level of completeness and accuracy of the data captured in these datasets, and extensive work is being done with the provider NHS Trusts and multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) to optimise the quality of data. The latest completeness information is available to providers via the CancerStats2 portal. (This opens in a new window). 

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This initial disease profile report is intended to enable comparison with international jurisdictions, and identification of regional variation which should lead to improvements in clinical practice and outcomes in due course. Data presented in this report are available as a download from the report contents page.