BAD-NDRS partnership

The aim of this strategic partnership between the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) and the British Association of Dermatologists (BAD) is to use the world leading high quality national cancer data at NDRS to improve skin cancer knowledge, healthcare planning and patient care. A post-doctoral data analyst is embedded within NDRS, funded by the BAD, to develop and complete selected project ideas.

The partnership has already delivered the following projects:

• Development of a formally approved standard operating procedure (SOP) for counting basal cell carcinoma (BCC) and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC). Collectively these cancers are known as keratinocyte cancers (KC). This new SOP changed the method from only counting the first BCC and cSCC per patient to counting the first BCC and cSCC tumour per patient per annum. This improved method allows for a more accurate representation of the tumour burden in the UK. Collaboration with cancer registries from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland results in the first national keratinocyte cancer report (2013-2015) with a more recent update which can be found here (2013-2018)
• Evaluation of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on skin cancer incidence in the UK using the rapid registration dataset. The published article is available here.
• Development of an agreed list of operating procedure codes for all skin cancers, including non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC), which enables these codes to be included in the routine production of treatment flags at PHE, and enabled melanoma to be incorporated into the COVID-19 Rapid Cancer Registration and Treatment Data Dashboard.

The current projects are:

• Developing the skin cancer section of the publicly available ‘Get Data Out’ (GDO) NDRS website, which will publish information on a subsets of skin cancers that have never previously been routinely reported on a national level. This includes skin cancers such as melanoma, BCC, cSCC and rare non-melanoma skin tumours. GDO will publish annual tumour counts and age-standardised incidence rates, with additional information presented where possible, such as crude or net survival statistics and routes to diagnosis information.
• Developing an updated project plan to routinely report on keratinocyte cancer incidence in the UK by working with cancer registries in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
• Reporting on national incidence rates and patient demographics of Eccrine porocarcinoma, a malignant skin cancer of the sweat glands, between 2013 and 2018 in England.
• Improving data quality by encouraging clinicians to use the cancerstats tool now available on the NDRS website to assess BCC and cSCC data collection.

We are continuously developing new project ideas, please get in touch if you have an important research question that you feel is unanswered.

For more information on how to get involved please contact the BAD Research team using the form below.