NEMICS Priority Population Exploration toolkit

Driving Equity in Cancer Care: A Smarter Way to Understand Priority Populations

Ensuring equitable and quality cancer care is available to all Australians requires a robust understanding of how cancer care policy, access to services, and a person’s experience of cancer care interconnect with their demographic profile to produce inequity. Traditionally, current state analyses for cancer service improvement efforts focus on project-specific aspects of cancer care, limiting the capacity for broader insights into the needs of priority populations to be captured.

To address this gap, NEMICS has developed a new investigative protocol that offers a comprehensive and systematic approach for assessing the current state of cancer care for priority population groups. This multi-pronged framework combines rapid literature reviews, policy and resource scans, patient experiences, dataset explorations, and cancer-related data analysis to build a comprehensive picture of cancer care delivery.

It is designed to identify evidence-based, data-informed cancer service improvement opportunities that are tailored to the needs of the local community. Each of the investigations included in the protocol were initially piloted in the work conducted by NEMICS investigating LGBTIQA+ cancer care and refined through work with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) populations. This has led to the successful advocacy for the inaugural VICS CALD Summit being held in February 2026.

The Priority Population Exploration toolkit sets a new benchmark for targeted, measurable, and repeatable service improvement. It provides clear parameters for structured data collection, establishes a baseline for evaluation, and supports ongoing tracking of progress and impact.

NEMICS was pleased to showcased this innovative approach at the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare 2025, held in Canberra in November.