Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Does delaying cancer treatment lead to worse survival? Many studies have tried to address this question, but a clear answer has yet to be reached. The current methods for testing the impact of treatment delay on survival are inconsistent. Some produce invalid and/or incomparable results. Thus, current research is ineffective at informing public policy and improving patient care. Standardized procedures are needed to study how much cancer treatment delay impacts survival. New guidelines are being developed to tell researchers how to test the impact of cancer treatment delay on survival. Our research will assess the effectiveness of these guidelines. We will conduct this study at the Cancer Care and Epidemiology Division of the Queen’s Cancer Research Institute. To assess the guidelines, we will follow them to conduct our own treatment delay study. We will use de-identified Ontario health data to investigate the effects of treatment delay on survival. This relationship will be tested for head and neck cancers treated with radiation. This cancer affects equity-deserving groups and unfortunately, treatment delays are common. The results of this study can be used to promote health policy change in Ontario. Thus, it could lead to the improvement of patient outcomes. Once completed, we can address our second goal. We will determine the usefulness and clarity of the guidelines. Our study will provide practical insights to improve the current guidelines. We expect the guidelines to be beneficial to use for all cancer treatment delay studies. Thus, we expect to encourage researchers to use these guidelines consistently. This work benefits the research community and may lead to improved research quality. Policymakers could then use this research to improve patient care globally.