ideasIdea
Public country dashboards for the three WHO breast cancer targets
The WHO set three simple goals for breast cancer: most cancers found early, diagnosis within 60 days, and most patients finishing treatment. Every country should publish how it is doing on each, every year.
The WHO Global Breast Cancer Initiative pillars are: at least 60% of invasive cancers diagnosed at stage I-II, diagnosis within 60 days of presentation, and at least 80% of patients completing multimodal treatment. These are measurable with modest registry and hospital data. A public, comparable dashboard would focus ministries and donors on the delivery gaps rather than on new technology, and would show which policy changes move the numbers.
Hypothesis
Countries publishing annual GBCI indicators will improve at least two of the three indicators by ten percentage points within four years, faster than non-reporting comparators.
Rationale
Measurement with public accountability drove vaccine coverage and maternal mortality reporting; breast cancer has clear, accepted indicators but no reporting habit.
What would test it
Support ten countries to report baseline and annual indicators; compare trajectories with matched non-reporting countries using registry data.
Maturity
being tested at scale
Who has to act
policy
Cost to try
Medium ($1M to $50M)
Years to first evidence
4
Bottlenecks it attacks
- Most of the world has almost no cancer care · Seven in ten cancer deaths happen in low- and middle-income countries, where radiotherapy, pathology, surgery and drugs are scarce.
- Fragmented care and guideline gaps · Patients fall between specialists, wait for referrals and often do not get the treatment guidelines say they should.
- Weak real-world evidence and registries · We do not reliably know what happens to patients after approval, so we cannot tell which drugs deliver in practice.