Quality Cancer Data Saves Lives
The Vital Role of Cancer Registrars in the Fight Against Cancer
Slide Presentations and Speaker Notes
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Introduction and Overview
Due to increased demand for current comprehensive cancer data and changes within the industry, employment opportunities for the cancer registrar have expanded to every level of the cancer surveillance community including regulatory agencies, accrediting organizations, researchers, pharmaceutical firms, software vendors, and contract services providers. Expansion of employment opportunities has contributed to a shortage of cancer registrars in the United States. It has also been brought to our attention that there is little knowledge in other allied health fields of this potential career choice.
NPCR recognizes this shortage of cancer registrars and acknowledges that without an adequate number of well-trained cancer registrars, accurate, dependable, and timely cancer research and statistics reporting will be compromised.
Health Information Management (HIM) professionals historically have been one of the major areas for career progression into the cancer registry field. Their training makes them uniquely qualified to transition into the field of cancer registration with minimal additional training.
Recognizing the implications of this cancer registrar shortage, NPCR developed a cancer registrar recruitment project with National Cancer Registrars Association (NCRA). The purpose of this project is to increase the number of trained professionals choosing a career as cancer registrar by informing HIM students and other allied health professionals of the career option of cancer registrar. NPCR contracted with NCRA to develop three PowerPoint presentations of various lengths describing the cancer registry profession.
NPCR mailed a copy of these presentations, along with NCRA brochures on certified tumor registrars (CTR) and a list of all HIM schools by state with contact information, to each state central cancer registry and state cancer registrar association president. We asked them to work together to identify a CTR in each city that has a HIM school who will try to make arrangements to present this information to the students in their program.
We believe by working together, we can achieve our goal of collecting complete, high-quality data in all states and make a difference in the lives of thousands of people with cancer.
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