Poster Presentation Clinical Oncology Society of Australia Annual Scientific Meeting 2023

Melanoma in Gippsland – Using Data to Drive Service Development (#426)

Mahesh Iddawela 1 2 , Kashif Sheikh 1 , Stewart Harper 1 , Caroline Lasry 1
  1. Gippsland Regional Integrated Cancer Services, Traralgon, VIC, Australia
  2. La Trobe Regional Health Service, Traralgon, VIC

Background

 

Care Closer to home is one of the priorities of the Victoria Cancer Plan and important for a quality public health system. Integrated primary care data and hospital information on patient care is essential for developing efficient pathways. We developed a collaborative partnership with the Gippsland Primary Health Network (Gippsland PHN) and Gippsland Regional Integrated Cancer Service (GRICS) with the aim to investigate and compare patterns and trends in melanoma treatment for Gippsland residents between 2018-2020.

 

Methods

GRICS partnered with the Gippsland PHN to acquire primary health data for comparison with health service data.

 

  • The Population Level Analytics and Reporting (POLAR) data set from PHN incorporating 80% of GP practices, the Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED) and Victorian Cancer Registry (VCR) dataset were used in this analysis

 

Results:

 

The VCR reported 600 new incidences of melanoma in Gippsland between 2018-2020. Whereas the Gippsland PHN POLAR dataset indicated 991 new diagnoses of melanoma with 517 patients being billed for MBS items 31371 to 31376 by general practitioners (GPs) locally. Additionally, the VAED data indicated 782 Gippsland patients and 2836 admissions were assigned ICD-10 AM code ‘C43’ for the 2018-2020 period when calculated by calendar year.

 

The VAED also indicated 135 ‘biopsy of lymphatic structure’ being performed for Gippsland residents at state-wide health services during 2018-2020, where 17 were performed in Gippsland as opposed to 118 outside of Gippsland.

 

Conclusion:

 

Integration and careful analysis of data from multiple sources is essential for service development and quality improvement. A larger research project is now planned to utilise this information to establish melanoma referral pathways, models of care and services to develop best pathways for diagnoses and procedures for Gippsland melanoma patients.