Cancer registry calls on men to come forward
Amanda Nicholson, Cayman Islands Cancer Registrar
(CNS): Efforts by doctors and health researchers to understand the impact of cancer on the Cayman Islands are still struggling to get the information they need in the absence of any mandatory reporting, as only 351 people have come forward. As most of those are women, officials are calling on more men to come forward. In order to lay a solid foundation for cancer prevention and management, healthcare experts need to understand what cancer trends look like in our population, but until it becomes a reportable disease, the registry is depending on cancer survivors to voluntarily share their anonymized information. However, to improve the data set, it needs more men to register.
The policy of the Health Services Authority has been to seek a mandatory register. However, during his contribution to the budget debate, Health Minister Dwayne Seymour, although he largely read from a prepared document, appeared to deviate from the script in front of him on the issue of a mandatory register to say he did not support it, undermining the efforts of the authority to push for that goal.
In order for Cayman to have better outcomes for patients, experts need to have a far better understanding of the trends or patterns in incidences of the disease; while the voluntary register has provided some data for experts to work with, they are struggling to get men to come forward.
Given that the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics indicate that the cancer rate is almost 25% higher in men than in women and that cancer mortality rate is 15% higher than women, Cayman needs more data about the impact the disease has here on the male population. Cancer Registrar Amanda Nicholson said that despite the increase in registration since the start of 2017, the rate of voluntary registration by men remains low.
“Though Movember has ended, we want to continue the awareness of men’s health issues such as prostate and testicular cancer, two of the most common types of cancers among men,” said Nicholson. “We want to promote the important role male survivors can play in the development of effective cancer programmes by helping us to gain more insight into how cancer is affecting the male population in our country.”
WHO states that to reduce the suffering and deaths caused by cancer, programmes for early diagnosis, screening, high-quality treatment and palliative care need to be implemented. But the barriers that delay cancer diagnosis must first be identified and assessed, and these factors may originate from patients to carers to health systems.
Dr Troy Gatcliffe, an oncologist at the Miami Cancer Institute at Baptist Health South Florida who recently attended the Cayman Islands National Healthcare Conference, called on people to support the register because currently, the breakdown of cancers identified can only be based on the 351 locally reported cases.
People who are willing to register are asked to contact Amanda Nicholson at 244-2560 or amanda.nicholson@hsa.ky. Registering is fast, easy and only takes a couple of minutes. It can be done face to face or via e-mail.
Category: Health, Medical Health
Stick to educating the population, and get them to see their doctors and do not seek to register cancer “offenders”. By establishing such a register, you will simply deter people from going to their doctors. The level of trust in Caymanian society simply does not exist, so stop wasting time, effort and money on this. Thank you Dwayne for your honesty. I believe that you do understand your society unlike so many do-gooders.
I wouldn’t waste two drops of piss on giving that information to government. There is nothing confidential with them or the islands. They have an agenda and it is rarely good or productive!
i am a native caymanian male and i wouldnt want the government to know if i had cancer? it none of their datn business!!?
Stupidity is genetic I see, probably scared to have a doctor test you for prostate cancer cause you “aren’t down with that gay shit”
Have a fun life
In all the years I read the comments on caymannewsservice, this has to be THE dumbest comment in history.
communism?? ya all wanna know everything about us huh?
No apologies, but the CI Government would be amongst the last organisations I would freely give personal medical records.
They can GTF.
None of the government’s damn business!
Why would anyone provide health data to the government. How will data collection help those who are suffering ? This is baloney.
Doesnt matter. The population is too small for statistics to mean anything.
The statistics are meant to display the situation in Cayman, exempli gratia what our numbers look like if they are properly compared to numbers from around the world, so we can see the prevalence in cancer among our population and also they prevalence of specific types and stages of said cancer.
Statistics don’t have to be 1 to 1 to be compared, assumptions can be made within a reasonable margin of error using probabilities and and the data that is available
In conclusion data is almost always useful, they do have a purpose and a meaning even if you can’t see it try not to be so cynical, and so uneducated.
OK, so who is the ‘baseline’ that you’re comparing the CI stats to (once you have them)? USA or Vanuatu?
I work with stats. I am not cynical. you are right that “data is almost always useful”. However you haven’t actually said how this data would be useful, much less specifically addressed the OP’s point re the inaccuracies inherent in statistics with a small sample & population size(s).