Philam Foundation, the corporate social responsibility arm of Philam Life through its Alliance for the Philippines’s Health and Advocacy (Alpha) initiative, shared the latest cancer statistics pooled from Cancer CARE Registry Philippines’s hospital-based cancer registry in a recent press event in Makati.
In a presentation led by CARE President and CEO Dr. Beatrice Tiangco, it was noted that cancer still figures among the primary causes of morbidity and mortality in the country, with breast cancer as the leading cancer scourge among Filipinos. In this hospital-based database, breast cancer is followed by colorectal and head and neck, cervical, prostate and lung cancers in decreasing rank of incidence, as compared to Globocan’s 2018 data which puts lung, colon and liver cancers on top of the list after breast cancer.
The first-year results also showed that the other most common areas where cancer grows include the thyroid, uterus, kidney and in the blood, which includes leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. “The most recent available data on cancer from the Global Cancer Network, or Globocan, [reveals] there were an estimated 141,021 new cases of cancer in the Philippines in 2018. With the data we gather, through the continued support of the Alpha initiative of Philam Foundation, we can explore ways on how to give cancer patients better access to medical support and assistance,” Tiangco said.
Acoording to Tiangco, timely and accurate cancer statistics are crucial to identify priorities for cancer control strategies at the national level, and hospital-based registries are important tools for region-specific data
creation as well as policy formulation, with an emphasis on the development of effective screening programs.
Two population-based cancer registries—the Philippine Cancer Society-Manila Cancer Registry and the Department of Health-Rizal Cancer Registry—have been the main source of cancer incidence data in the country for more than 30 years. Through the passage of the National Integrated Cancer Law (RA 11215), however, all clinics and hospitals are now mandated to have their own cancer registry to serve as crucial source of data for a population-based national cancer registry.
By the end of 2018, 20 hospitals were part of the CARE-Alpha membership, with 10 hospitals sharing data on over 5,700 cancer registrants.
CARE Philippines is solely responsible for the security of the anonymized data with a secure and encrypted Care central database accessible only by Care executives Beatrice Tiangco and Ric Parma.
All patients are informed that the hospital maintains a cancer registry database that contains personal information about those diagnosed with and or treated for cancer within that hospital. These patients are also given the opportunity to opt out of the database, and to agree or disagree to being called by the Cancer Registry office once every six or more months up to five years from their diagnosis of cancer.
Duplication of data will also be recognized and red-flagged in the central database. The CARE Database Administrators will look at the detailed data entry of these flagged patients and decide if these are from the same patient or not. The summary data presented to the public in the CARE web site will consider these duplicate entries (even if from different hospitals) as only one patient.
“One of the gaps in the health sector is the need for a cancer registry due to lack of data. We were hoping that something could be done, so we tried to embark on a project to establish a registry. Thankfully, we came across CARE Philippines, and they were doing it already, and we felt that instead of reinventing the wheel, why don’t we just collaborate? As a result, we signed an agreement in 2017 to establish Alpha and together, we tried to keep the hospital-based registry up and running,” said Philam Foundation President Max Ventura.
Philam Foundation Chairman Aibee Cantos, in a statement, said: “Our hope is that we get a clearer picture of the cancer situation in the country and help the Filipino cancer patients in their journey, as well as contribute to cancer control and prevention. Philam Foundation will continue to support the future initiatives of CARE, through the Alpha consortium, to champion more advocacies that will contribute to better patient care and management, helping more Filipinos live healthier, longer and better lives.”
With RA 11215 or the National Integrated Cancer Law, CARE Philippines will work with the Department of Health and other stakeholders in creating and maintaining a population-based national cancer registry system. For more information, visit their official web site: www.cancerregistryph.com/careph.