The New Zealand national tumour standards describe the level of service that a person with cancer should have access to in New Zealand. They are used by the DHBs as the benchmarks for high quality care for different types of cancer and help ensure patients receive timely, good quality care along the cancer pathway.
The first tumour specific standards to be developed were the Standards of Service Provision for Lung Cancer Patients in New Zealand, published in 2011.
Subsequently, in December 2013, the Ministry of Health published 10 sets of provisional tumour standards for breast, bowel, melanoma, gynaecological, lymphoma, myeloma, head and neck, thyroid, sarcoma and upper gastrointestinal cancer.
The standards were developed by tumour standards working groups of clinical staff and consumer representatives for each tumour type.
Since their publication DHBs have been reviewing the services they provide against these standards. They have also begun implementing improvement strategies where equity issues have been identified during their reviews.
On the 20th June 2018 the Ministry of Health published the Minimum Standards for Molecular Testing of Colorectal Cancer in New Zealand.