The Health Services Authority and the Cayman Islands Cancer Registry join communities throughout the world to observe Cancer Registrars Week, April 8-12, 2019 and recognise the country’s progression in cancer registration and research. Cancer Registrars Week promotes how the data cancer registrars collect provide essential information to researchers, healthcare providers and public health officials to better monitor and advance cancer treatments, conduct research and improve cancer prevention and screening programmes. 

The 2019 theme, Cancer Registrars: Capturing the Picture of Cancer, reflects this important role of cancer registrars in the goal to prevent and find a cure for cancer. “Quality cancer data is central to the nation’s fight against cancer, and cancer registrars are the first link in capturing that data,” said the Cayman Islands Cancer Registrar Amanda Nicholson. “The information collected is largely demographic in nature and allows us to see how this disease is impacting our community.” The Cayman Islands continues to advance towards the development of a more comprehensive cancer registry. 

On review of data collected for the 2018 year, Ms Nicholson confirmed a 20% increase in registration rates when compared with 2017. “For a number of reasons, media exposure being a big one, more people are choosing to participate in the cancer registry. Presently, we have 443 registrants in the CanReg 5 registry, which is the database we use. It was developed by the World Health Organization and is used by registrars all over the world,” she stated. Ms Nicholson shared that the top five most commonly reported cancers to date are breast cancer (with infiltrating duct carcinoma being most prevalent), colon cancer, cancers of the blood, prostate cancer and ovarian cancer. 

The Cayman Islands Cancer Registry is a unique health registry, which has been designed to capture cancer surveillance data on the very diverse and multicultural population of the Cayman Islands. The registry was developed to better understand what cancer trends look like within the Cayman Islands, thereby making it possible to do more in terms of prevention. Presently, there is very little information available regarding cancer statistics in the Cayman Islands. 

“We still don’t know how many individuals are diagnosed within our country each year, which types of cancer are most common, or whether our cancer rates are higher or lower than those of other Caribbean countries. The Cayman Islands Cancer Registry hopes to answer these questions,” noted Ms Nicholson. Cancer survivors wishing to join the cancer registry may contact the Registrar Amanda Nicholson, at [email protected] or at (345) 244-2560. All information included in the registry is confidential and anonymised, which means names are excluded, before being entered into a database. Registering is fast and easy.