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The Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer have released the country’s first strategy to focus on data challenges.

This comes after the pandemic highlighted critical issues with health data in Canada, and months after the federal government called on provinces and territories to adopt common standards and policies related to health data.

The strategy has a framework to guide the mission, its vision, values and success factors for improvements in cancer data, and identifies three areas for action and investment including:

• Improving efficiency, timeliness and quality of data capture and access
• Enhancing linkages to current data
• Fill gaps in current data collection and availability

It also has a section devoted to the importance of data sovereignty for First Nation, Métis and Inuit, with examples of efforts led by those groups to improve data and data governance.

The strategy and its associated documents can be found here.