CAQ Strategic Plan 2024-26

Our 2024-26 strategic plan outlines key strategies aimed at realising our goals of engagement, leadership and impact. We're committed to achieving measurable success and providing clear insights into how the healthcare system performs, to help improve cancer care delivery and patient outcomes for all Queenslanders with cancer.

This document outlines the vision, strategy and next steps in shaping the future of Cancer Alliance Queensland.

Rare Cancer Care & Research Fund

The Rare Cancer Care & Research Fund was established in October 2022 through the generosity and foresight of two patients of the Sunshine Coast Hospital and Health Service. In essence, the Fund helps provide patient-centred care and research initiatives that advance the provision of care for people with rare forms of cancer. Funds will not be applied to initiatives for those forms of cancer for which significant government and private funding is already available.

The Fund operates under the auspice of Wishlist (Sunshine Coast Health Foundation) in collaboration with Sunshine Coast University Hospital (SCUH), particularly the Medical Oncology Unit and the Research Governance and Development Unit. Collaborations are also in place with key external parties including Cancer Alliance Queensland and Australian Families 4 Genomics.

Queensland AML Quality Index 2012-2021

The Queensland Acute Myeloid Leukaemia Quality Index has been developed through extensive consultation with the Haematology Sub-committee, comprising of expert haematologists from across Queensland. This report is the first of its kind and aims to provide not only an epidemiological overview but also an analysis of key quality indicators. The retrospective data used in this Index is useful for benchmarking and establishing baseline AML treatment rates for Queensland.  The Index reports on 10 years of data from 2012-2021, and includes outcomes such as multidisciplinary team review, FLT3 testing, treatment patterns, 30-day mortality and survival.

Queensland Brain Cancer Quality Index

The Queensland Brain Cancer Quality Index is the first brain cancer report in more than a decade and the most detailed brain cancer report published to date by Cancer Alliance Queensland. This Index is useful for benchmarking and establishing baseline brain cancer management patterns for Queensland. The indicators cover multiple stages of the patient journey including diagnosis, surgery, radiation and survival with specific indicators for particular pathological subtypes of brain cancer. The report highlights that over the two five-year periods increased access to radiation therapy has seen more Queenslanders receiving radiation therapy for their brain cancer diagnosis and more Queenslanders receiving their radiation therapy within appropriate time frames.

$6 Million Medical Research Future Fund

This funding will support the establishment of an Australian Brain Cancer Registry (ABCR) to improve quality of life and survival for a cancer group that has not seen any noticeable change in outcomes in decades. With this grant, Brain Cancer Biobanking Australia (BCBA) and project partners, Cancer Alliance Queensland (CAQ) and the Australian e-Health Research Centre at CSIRO, will establish the ABCR by developing infrastructure, natural language processing and a data dictionary to enable the automated electronic collection of the data points required to report Clinical Quality Indicators.

Papua New Guinea Cancer Registry

A signing ceremony officiated the joint initiative between Metro South Health (MSH), Cancer Alliance Queensland, the Port Moresby General Hospital, and the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Papua New Guinea. Cancer Alliance Queensland will assist Papua New Guinea (PNG) establish a national cancer registry and provide web-based software (QOOL-PNG) to enable the capture of incidence and mortality data for the PNG cancer population.