Aim

In 2005 there were four public providers of radiotherapy in Queensland, which increased to nine in 2014.  This study aims to determine if the increase in the number of public radiotherapy services has changed the public radiotherapy utilisation rate for cancer patients in Queensland. 

Methods

The authors extracted cancer incidence data in Queensland (invasive tumours) for the years 2005 to 2014 from the Oncology Analysis System and pooled data from hospital and health services to identify the number of cancer patients who accessed at least one course of radiotherapy treatment.  The public radiotherapy utilisation rate was calculated by determining the percentage of patients who accessed at least one course of publicly provided radiotherapy.

Results

The public radiotherapy utilisation rate increased by almost one quarter between 2005 and 2014, growing from 20.05% to 24.72%.  This reveals that public radiotherapy providers have not only kept up with rapidly increasing cancer incidence (which grew 33.37% over this time frame), but managed to grow the radiotherapy utilisation rate.

Conclusions

The opening of new radiotherapy services across Queensland is likely to be major contributing factor to the increase to the public radiotherapy utilisation rate.

As the total number of public radiotherapy services in Queensland will shortly expand to 11, future investigation would be required to determine if these additional services contribute further growth to the radiotherapy utilisation rate.

A limitation of this study was that there was no access to data on private radiotherapy utilisation. This information would be required to determine the extent to which Queensland meets the optimum overall radiotherapy utilisation rate, which has been established to be 46.6% in Queensland.  Additionally, the treatment figures from one regional service were unavailable, resulting in a slight undervaluing of the utilisation rate.