What Does a Cancer Registrar Do?

Question by Amaretta: What does a cancer registrar do?
This question is obviously for Denisedds. And where does a cancer registrar work? At a hospital or medical center? For the city/county/state/federal government? And who uses the statistics you accumulate? Have you noticed increases or decreases in specific types of cancer since you’ve been doing your job?

Best answer:

Answer by Awesome D
Why don’t you just email him instead of wasting everyone’s time.

Answer by Denisedds
Hi Amaretta,

Every state in the country is required by law to report their cancer cases to the government and each state gives that information to Washing to DC which is published and maintained by the National Cancer Institute. They in turn, along with other members of the UN give this information to the World Health Organization.

A cancer registrar can work at any of these levels, but the most common is on the local level where I work. We have to pull all the pertinent information from the patient’s medical records stage the cancer and send it to our local regional registry. This requires us to know the names of chemotherapy, hormonal therapy and immunotherapy drugs and which are used on which kind of cancer, what labs are important, what important things are seen on imagining, surgical procedures, pathological findings, the type, dates and dosage of radiation, etc. We need to report what is important and leave out what is irrelevant to the cancer.

We also conduct tumor boards for doctors at the hospitals we work for. These conferences discuss cases at that facility. Physicians from all specialties are there and as a group decide the best avenue to take in a patient’s treatment or sometimes they are presented as a learning tool usually because they are interesting or unusual.

Thanks to the electronic medical record I do most of my work from home and work for several hospitals at once. Most of us now are contract employees like me. I do have to go to hospitals from time to time. This is wonderful since I live in Los Angeles and as everyone knows we have horrible traffic. There are still registrars that work full time in hospitals that have cancer programs and large facilities often have independents like me do most the abstracting for them and their employees do other work that needs to be done at the hospital. I usually answer questions on Yahoo to distract me a little through the day.

Our data is used by researchers all over the world. I often see registrars from my local region doing special studies at the hospitals I work for. California is so large we have two regional registries LA County and all of southern California reports to USC which began in 1965. Due to the age of our registry, the diversity and size of our population our data is used more than any county in the country. They also go over our abstracts for accuracy, go to every hospital in the county and look at every pathology report to make sure we do not miss any cases and look at every death certificate in the county for the same reason and we are the only county to do so.

I think the most significant changes I have seen are younger people getting cancers that they rarely got before. These are usually HPV related and thankfully respond much better than the same cancer not HPV related. I am also starting to see more targeted treatment.

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