The statistics and results produced by the Finnish Cancer Registry are absolutely vital for the organisation of national public health. You must, after all, know your “opponent”. Cancer incidence by individual cancer, age group, region, occupation, type of cancer, and so on, is the information needed for advocacy. Cancer prevention is built on this information. So is the planning of screening and monitoring of its effectiveness. A comparison of management performance between regions can reveal differences in funding, commitment to management guidelines, adoption of good practices from other countries and many other characteristics. Knowing the differences in outcomes can lead to action to improve the situation, and the NGO and foundation cannot only provide funding but also facilitate mitigation in other ways. The central office of the CSF was enriched by the large team of researchers from the Cancer Registry working at the same premises. Small issues that arose could be solved immediately, and the researchers were also interested in cancer issues overall. This luxury has had to be partly abandoned for data security reasons, but it is hoped that this will change. However, researchers are still accessible in various ways. All this motivates the Secretary General to work for the funding of the Cancer Registry. Given the good reputation of the Registry, the task was not difficult at all. I believe that the registry members were also pleased that the information they provided was needed and used with enthusiasm.
