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The department of Türkiye's Ministry of Health that counts the country's cancers through registry centres in all 81 provinces and sets the standards for the national breast, cervical and bowel screening programmes, which run through family doctors and 318 screening centres.
The Kanser Dairesi Başkanlığı sits within the Ministry of Health's General Directorate of Public Health in Ankara (Bilkent campus, Üniversiteler Mahallesi, Şehit Mehmet Bayraktar Caddesi No:3, Çankaya). Its published duties include planning and running preventive cancer services, developing the cancer screening and registration systems, setting the national cancer screening standards, coordinating screening between family doctors and the Cancer Early Diagnosis, Screening and Training Centres (KETEM), collecting and checking the quality of all cancer statistics, and running the National Cancer Advisory Board. Cancer became a notifiable disease in Türkiye in 1982 and the department's predecessor, the Kanserle Savaş Daire Başkanlığı, was founded in 1983.
Registration: active, population-based registration began in İzmir in 1992 and, according to the department's 2020 statistics report, had started in all 81 provinces from the 2013 reference year. Certified registry staff collect cases from every public, university and private hospital, laboratory and death certificate in a province; the provincial databases are merged into a national data pool in Ankara. The annual Türkiye Kanser İstatistikleri report uses the 14 provinces whose data pass quality checks, covering 50.6% of the population in 2020, and scales their rates to the national population: 223,087 new cancers in 2019 and 195,581 in 2020, a fall of about 13% that the report attributes to people not seeking care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 report, published in Ankara in 2025, is the latest on the department's statistics page. Data from the İzmir, Antalya, Trabzon, Edirne, Bursa, Erzurum, Eskişehir, Samsun, Malatya and Gaziantep registries have been accepted into IARC's Cancer Incidence in Five Continents series, and the İzmir registry has been an IARC regional hub for cancer registration since 9 October 2013.
Screening: breast screening offers a mammogram every two years to women aged 40 to 69, cervical screening an HPV DNA test every five years to women aged 30 to 65, and bowel screening a faecal occult blood test every two years and a colonoscopy every ten years to men and women aged 50 to 70. The department's list of screening centres, dated 29 January 2025, names 318 KETEM centres across all 81 provinces.
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